Disaster Recovery (DR) is a security insurance strategy that protects a datacenter from the effects of a natural or man-made catastrophe. In the event of a disaster, a DR plan ensures a business can either quickly resume operations or maintain mission-critical functions during or after a disaster, depending on the severity of the event.
To better understand DR, we also must define a disaster in the technology industry. A disaster, in the most simple terms, is anything that puts an organization's operations at risk. This can be a cyberattack, a data breach, an equipment failure, a natural disaster, or even rats chewing through cables. Not to mention, any of the following can create an IT disaster:
- Data loss
- Human error
- Malware and viruses
- Network and internet blips
- Hardware and/or software failure
- Weather catastrophes
- Natural or pipe burst flooding
- Office vandalism or damage

When a disaster strikes, the goal of any DR plan is to ensure operations run as normal as possible. While the business will be aware of the crisis, its customers and end-users should not be affected whatsoever. The disaster recovery process includes planning and testing, and may involve a separate physical site for restoring operations.
Many businesses also opt for a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) strategy, a model that lets you duplicate and host servers in a separate datacenter through a third-party provider. Some cloud vendors offer a native DRaaS solution, which simplifies the installation process. Businesses rely on the third-party vendor to not be affected by the same disaster, and the moment a disaster strikes the original business, the third-party vendor will initiate a DR plan when the enterprise cannot.

The Definitive Guide to Data Protection and Disaster Recovery
Examine enterprise challenges and trends around availability and data protection—an area that has lagged in the modernization of infrastructure and applications. See how the simpler, more cost-effective approach taken by the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud can close the gap between where your data protection is today and where it needs to be.

On top of eliminating the risks associated with poor disaster recovery, there are several major benefits of ensuring your business has a well-established, easy-to-execute DR strategy in place.
