Disaster recovery is the process and plan for restoring IT systems, applications and data after a significant disruptive event, such as a cyber attack, hardware failure, fire or flood. It is the technology-focused component within a wider business continuity plan, defining exactly how quickly and to what point systems need to be restored to keep the business functioning.
How disaster recovery works
A disaster recovery plan is built around two key targets: Recovery Time Objective (RTO), the maximum acceptable downtime before a system must be restored, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time. These targets shape the technical solution, which might range from regular cloud backups for less critical systems to real-time data replication and standby infrastructure for systems that cannot tolerate any meaningful downtime. The plan should be tested periodically to confirm it works as intended.
Disaster recovery in practice for UK businesses
- A business sets an RTO of four hours and an RPO of one hour for its core finance system, sizing its backup and recovery solution accordingly rather than over- or under-investing.
- A company recovers fully from a ransomware attack within a day by restoring from clean, isolated backups, having tested this exact recovery scenario six months earlier.
- An SME combines cloud-hosted Business Central with Microsoft's underlying infrastructure resilience, reducing its own disaster recovery burden for that specific system compared to an on-premises equivalent.
- A business discovers during a planned disaster recovery test that a critical backup had silently been failing for weeks, fixing the issue before it could cause a real loss of data.
How Advantage supports disaster recovery planning
Advantage designs, implements and tests disaster recovery solutions for UK SMEs, setting realistic RTO and RPO targets and building the backup and recovery infrastructure to meet them. Find out more about our business continuity and disaster recovery services.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a backup and a disaster recovery plan?
A backup is a copy of data that can be restored if the original is lost or corrupted. A disaster recovery plan is broader, covering not just data backup but the full process of restoring systems, applications and infrastructure to working order after a significant incident, including how quickly this needs to happen and in what order.
What do RTO and RPO mean in disaster recovery?
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable time a system can be down before it must be restored. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, measured in time, such as losing at most one hour of data. Both figures shape the technical approach and cost of a disaster recovery solution.
How often should a disaster recovery plan be tested?
Best practice is to test a disaster recovery plan at least annually, and ideally more frequently for critical systems. Untested plans often have gaps, such as backups that have not actually been restorable, which only become apparent during a real incident if testing has not taken place beforehand.
