Computer systems and computerized infrastructure have become a load-bearing part of a modern business environment. As such, the potential for downtime is not just annoying – it is costly. Though the world is unpredictable, having an emergency plan in place through effective disaster recovery planning can ensure that an unexpected issue does not lead to an unexpected problem. This is the role of a High Availability and Disaster Recovery solution.
Understanding High Availability and Disaster Recovery
High Availability and Disaster Recovery is a multi-faceted endeavor of mutually supportive efforts. Though these concepts work in tandem to uplift one another, it is important to understand the boundaries between them.
What is High Availability?
High Availability refers to the capacity of a system, application, or other infrastructure component to readily continue operation. This encompasses the ability of an infrastructure component to be restarted, migrated, or otherwise recovered with minimal loss or regression in the operational state.
This is to say, the infrastructure is able to continue serving the designated role with access to up-to-date information. Additionally, highly available infrastructure may accommodate the ability for multiple infrastructure components to act in a primary role to provide availability.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery refers to the capacity of a system, application, or infrastructure component to withstand a catastrophic failure. Often, disaster recovery is concerned with the catastrophic and irrecoverable loss of some infrastructure component.
A simple example of a disaster recovery solution can be seen any time a data backup is taken and stored off-site. Doing this to protect the data against building-wide disasters that would make the original storage media unrecoverable meets the criteria of a disaster recovery solution, though via an implementation that leaves room for improvement.
How High Availability and Disaster Recovery Work Together
When combining High Availability and Disaster Recovery, both can work to aid the other’s stated goals. A High Availability solution accommodates the ability to ensure systems can resume their operative role in a timely manner, and the infrastructure that can resume the system’s operative role is frequently a part of the disaster recovery solution.
When planned accordingly, the ability to migrate workloads to a healthy infrastructure can enable a disaster recovery solution to operate quickly and effectively, minimizing downtime. These two elements work hand in hand to produce environments that prioritize resilience and uptime equally.
The Real Cost of Downtime
Every computer system, infrastructure component, or other element of a production environment is susceptible to failure. When failure occurs, it is easy to measure the opportunity cost for lost revenue, reduced productivity, or costs of remediating the issues from which downtime originated. These costs alone posed an average cost of $300,000 or more per hour of downtime, a figure cited by 91% of medium to large-sized companies estimating the cost of downtime, as reported in a study performed by International Technology Intelligence Consulting in 2024.
Often not considered, though, is the “soft cost” of downtime. Outages can erode customer confidence, blemish the reputation of an organization, and apply additional pressure to the personnel responsible for the environment. Though downtime does pose a very real and very immediate cost to business, the ripples of such an occurrence may send shockwaves through a business for months or years to come.
Make Resilience a Design Requirement
Infrastructure reaches the peaks of High Availability and the highest capacity for disaster recovery when it is designed with the intention of being a highly available environment that has a strong disaster recovery plan.
The first stage of honoring HA/DR as a design requirement entails setting realistic expectations. Often, these expectations can be summarized via the “Recovery Point Objective” (RPO) and “Recovery Time Objective” (RTO).
To briefly describe these metrics:
- Recovery Point Objective describes the data that an organization can stand to lose when restoring from a backup
- Recovery Time Objective describes the desired amount of time before an unavailable environment is able to return to operation.
Defining these metrics naturally sidesteps a common issue. As systems are prioritized by their HA/DR needs, systems that are more resilient to downtime can make use of simpler implementations. Systems that require extremely low RTO and RPO metrics, in turn, can be allocated more effort to ensure that the solutions in place on these systems are equipped to meet the higher operational standards.
Use Automation to Reduce Risk in Disaster Recovery Planning
When addressing the strategies for High Availability and Disaster Recovery, the topic is often business-critical systems. These systems often require speedy issue resolution performed in a reliable manner so that an issue does not spiral out of control. Though the personnel responsible for these systems are experts in the nuances of the environment, the potential of human error during issue resolution is an avoidable risk factor.
A robust High Availability and Disaster Recovery solution can incorporate automated failure detection along with automated recovery actions. Not only is the response faster when the issue is automatically detected and executes a recovery plan in kind, but an automated response also takes action methodically and efficiently without the possibility of human error.
Build Redundancy Beyond Technology
Though it is important to design with HA/DR in mind and ensure that solutions can provide automated responses, there is still a human element to designing, creating, and maintaining critical systems. The key to leveraging personnel in these solutions is to allow teams to work in a low-stress environment that allows for careful and methodical problem-solving approaches. When a person is involved in any work, the outcomes should undergo a validation process to ensure that the solution functions as intended.
Even further than the conditions in which work is done, it is also important to ensure that personnel have access to the knowledge that they need to work effectively. If only one person on a team is capable of a particular maintenance task, then there is potential for a gap in operations should they become unavailable.
Planning for operational continuity extends beyond on-system considerations. Ensuring that teams operate to reduce knowledge silos and can put their outcomes to the test before moving into production can protect systems by avoiding issues entirely.
Disaster Recovery Planning Best Practices for Resilient Systems
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to implementing High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions, there are guidelines and best practices that can help build out a disaster recovery planning strategy that suits your organization. The aforementioned points serve as a great foundation. Additionally, improvements can be found via some generally applicable goals such as finding and eliminating single points of failure, documenting processes with clear roles and responsibilities, maintaining an identical QA copy of the production environment to validate procedures, distributing systems across geographically distinct regions, and frequently reviewing and updating documentation.
Preparing for the Next Disruption with Disaster Recovery Planning
Disruptions are inevitable, and no organization wants to experience an outage from a failure that could have been predicted and avoided. Taking an approach of intentional planning and implementing a layered solution to provide environments with High Availability and Disaster Recovery ensures that, whether predictable or not, an environment is prepared to weather issues and continue operating at full capacity, so business can operate without a hiccup.
Request a demo to see how SIOS high availability and disaster recovery solutions help protect critical systems and keep your business running.
Author: Philip Merry, SIOS Technology Corp.
