Disaster recovery planning

  • 10 minutes

Disaster recovery (DR) planning helps your school bounce back from high-impact events, such as a cybersecurity attack or fire, that result in downtime and data loss. Regardless of the cause, the best remedy for a disaster is a well-defined and tested DR plan and an application design that actively supports DR.

A disaster recovery plan can be structured in various ways and can contain many kinds of information. A comprehensive recovery plan contains these elements:

  • A plan to acquire hardware, or to create and share virtual servers in another location.
  • A communication plan.
  • A list of people who must be contacted if a disaster occurs.
  • Instructions for contacting the people who are involved in the response to the disaster.
  • Information about who administers the plan.
  • A checklist of the tasks that are required for each recovery scenario. To help you review the disaster recovery later, initial each task on the checklist as it is completed, and indicate the time that the task was completed.

Your plan should be a living document that you routinely review and update as your environment evolves. Present the plan to the appropriate teams (operations, school leadership, and stakeholders) regularly. Store it in a highly available, secure data store such as OneDrive. Learn how to start your DR plan.

Restore data

In 2022, 92% of schools affected by ransomware attacks didn't use effective data loss prevention measures, leading to critical data loss. During a disaster, there are two main methods of restoring data: backups and replication.

Data replication

Data Replication creates real-time or near-real-time copies of live data in multiple data store replicas with minimal data loss in mind. The goal of replication is to keep replicas synchronized with as little latency as possible while maintaining application responsiveness.

Most fully featured database systems and other data-storage products and services include some kind of replication as a tightly integrated feature, due to its functional and performance requirements. An example is geo-redundant storage (GRS).

Backups

Backups restore data to a specific point in time. Performing regular backups and testing them periodically is a crucial cybersecurity practice in K-12 schools, ensuring the preservation and availability of critical data if there's a security breach or system failure. CISA recommends that K-12 entities back up all key systems regularly, and also regularly test partial and full restoration of data, documenting the practice in a written plan. Backups should be stored offline and disconnected from the network.

By using backups, you can provide simple, secure, and cost-effective solutions to back up and recover your data to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Use Azure Backup to create long-lived, read-only data snapshots for use in recovery.

Azure Backup works to help protect your staff, students, and community from ransomware attacks and data loss. Benefits include the ability to:

  • Manage backup data at scale
    • Manage and monitor your entire backup estate from a central console with Backup center.
    • Stay compliant by enforcing backups at scale with Azure Policy.
    • Audit and analyze backup data using the historical data and patterns shown in Backup reports.
  • Secure your backups
    • Prevent accidental data loss by retaining backups for 14 days after deletion with soft delete.
    • Protect data against ransomware attacks by enabling multiple-user authentication as an additional layer of authorization for critical operations.
  • Reduce costs
    • Eliminate extra costs of additional backup infrastructure and overhead for scaling and managing storage.
    • Selectively back up disks to customize your backup solution and reduce storage costs.
  • Protect a diverse set of workloads
    • Back up all your infrastructure, databases, and storage workloads with ease from a central location.
    • Safeguard against data loss with Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage.

Offsite data storage

To help prepare for disaster recovery, NIST suggests saving more than one backup file to safeguard your information. It's also important to consider what set of backup files and other information need to be secured offline, in a separate and accessible location. This may include passwords, digital certificates, encryption keys, and other information needed to reestablish school operations quickly.

To increase the chances of recovering lost or corrupted data, follow the 3-2-1 rule:

  • Keep three copies of any important file: one primary and two backups.
  • Keep the files on two different media types to protect against different types of hazards.
  • Store one copy - or "go bag" - off-site (for example, outside the school or district facility).

Site recovery

Disaster scenarios also commonly result in downtime. In most cases, application recovery involves failover to a separate, working deployment. As a result, it may be necessary to recover processes in another Azure region if there's a large-scale disaster.

You can use several different strategies and Azure features, such as Azure Site Recovery, to improve your application's support for process recovery after a disaster. Learn more about Azure Site Recovery in this video.

Plan for communication

Developing and executing efficient recovery communications is pivotal for achieving organizational resilience, with its success hinging on planning. Learn why effective communication planning is important and how to address these concerns.

  • Legal ramifications: Messages conveyed during the recovery phase can carry significant legal and regulatory implications, necessitating careful wording to mitigate risks. Detailed planning and discussions beforehand are essential to comprehend the legal boundaries of communication, including the timing and internal and external recipients of messages, to ensure compliance.
  • Informing stakeholders: Key stakeholders must be adequately informed to fulfill their roles during recovery and maintain confidence in the recovery team's capabilities. Crafting appropriate messaging for various stakeholders, such as educators, families, school boards, and the community requires thorough planning, testing, and continual refinement.
  • Dissemination of information: Individual team members may lack complete information to provide accurate and timely recovery updates, highlighting the necessity of predetermined reporting structures within the communications plan. Establishing clear agreements in advance on who disseminates information to whom is a critical component of effective communication planning.

Next steps

Evaluate your institution's disaster recovery plan using this list then note any areas of opportunity for each section. Our disaster recovery plan contains:

  • A plan to acquire hardware, or to create and share virtual servers in another location.
  • A communication plan.
  • A list of people who must be contacted if a disaster occurs.
  • Instructions for contacting the people who are involved in the response to the disaster.
  • Information about who administers the plan.
  • A checklist of the tasks that are required for each recovery scenario.