At times when production was reliant on physical means, such as machinery, plants, paperwork, etc., these were the assets a company's management had to worry about when a mishap, like equipment failure or natural disasters, occurred. However, as data has become the sole central element to today's economy, data flow is the thing to worry about lest disaster hits. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the world contained 4.4 Zettabytes (ZB), or 4.4 billion TB, of data in 2013, a number that was forecasted to increase almost tenfold by the year 2020. Disaster Recovery
Over and above that, the modern business environment has developed in a way where businesses in most industries are obliged to make themselves available around the clock if they are to stand any chance in today's fierce competition. This makes the breakdown of a company's system no matter how briefly, not merely harmful, but rather catastrophic, for its business operation.
IDC estimated the cost of downtime (the time when a company's machines, particularly the computers, are not running) averages at around $100,000 per hour, and that number is merely 1/16 from what the maximum hourly cost could reach for the largest organizations ($1.6 million). As a matter of fact, without the occurrence of any big events, companies experience somewhere between 10 to 20 hours of downtime per year, so one can only imagine what the impact of a natural disaster or a major cyber-attack could be like for business operations.
From here emerged the need for the concept of Disaster Recovery (DR), which is basically a strategy that a company puts to work in order to ensure the immediate resumption of what are called in business terms, "mission-critical functions," following a major disaster. Network Services
Disaster recovery strategies are designed to anticipate the potential hazard of such events on the company's IT infrastructure, and accordingly, a plan is set to recover as much data as possible following the disaster, by creating constant backups of any data flowing through the company's system throughout daily operations, the frequency of which is determined by the recovery point objective (RPO), which is part of the DR plan. This data is often stored in a physical site separate from the company's location. The other core element of the DR plan is the recovery time objective (RTO), which determines how much downtime can pass before the system starts to recover its data from the backup site. MSP Services