Purpose of a Disaster Recovery Plan #
The aim of a Disaster Recovery Plan is to enable the resumption of part of the Information System after a disaster or critical incident.
- It brings together technical, organizational and security measures to rapidly restart servers, restore replicated data and relaunch applications.
The DRP therefore focuses on the recovery of the Information System after a disaster, while the Business Continuity Plan aims to maintain activity during the disaster itself.
The difference between Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) #
Although this difference may not necessarily appear in articles on business continuity, there is a notable difference between the two terminologies, DRP and DRP.
Indeed, it has become rather easy to restart servers in a backup environment, even more so when the source infrastructure is identical (or close) to the backup infrastructure, e.g. same hypervisor technology: VSphere, VMware Cloud Director, …
Nuabee’s choice from the outset was to be source hypervisor agnostic (be it an On premise hypervisor managed by the customer or a Cloud hypervisor managed by the Cloud provider) and to be able to transform a Windows or Linux server so that it could restart in an OpenStack Cloud.
But simply restarting a set of servers in a backup infrastructure is called a Disaster Recovery Plan.
A Disaster Recovery Plan must also integrate the recovery of networks and security architectures in the event of a disaster or cyber-attack.
In short, a Disaster Recovery Plan = IT Disaster Recovery Plan + Network Disaster Recovery Plan + Security Plan.
Reconnecting users #
On the network side, Nuabee has developed several solutions to enable remote sites or users to be reconnected:
- An appliance called Nuabee Cloud Access (NCA) offers an Internet-based connection solution between a Customer’s fallback site(s) and servers restarted in the cloud when a DRP is activatedIt
- also enables regular DRP tests to be carried out, allowing the Customer to remotely test the provision of the DRP service.
- A solution that enables mobile users to be reconnected outside of licensed
- solutionsAs proprietary solutions are constrained by their licensing in a Cloud model, Nuabee can offer an integrated solution based on FOSS technologies.
Site and user reconnection testing #
The network reconnection test is included in Nuabee’s DRP offer. It consists of verifying the switchover of the customer’s production network in the event of a disaster recovery plan being activated and, depending on the scope of the project, testing mobile reconnection mechanisms (SSL VPN, etc.).