Disaster recovery (information technology)

Disaster recovery is the planned restoration of data, applications, and IT infrastructure after a disruptive event. It aims to resume essential services within defined time and data-loss limits.

Recovery time objective: The maximum acceptable time for restoring a service after disruption. This target sets the deadline that recovery procedures must meet.
Business impact analysis: A process for assessing how disruptions affect an organization’s operations and priorities. It identifies which services need the fastest restoration and strongest protection.
Cloud disaster recovery: The use of cloud services to restore IT workloads and data after disruption. Cloud resources can provide alternate capacity without maintaining a full second data center.
High availability: The design of systems to remain operational with minimal interruption despite component failures. High availability limits service interruption, while disaster recovery addresses larger disruptions and restoration.
Recovery point objective: The maximum acceptable amount of data loss, measured as time before an outage. This target determines how frequently recoverable copies must be made.
Business continuity: The planning and actions that keep an organization’s essential activities operating during disruption. Disaster recovery is the IT-focused part of this broader continuity effort.
Disaster recovery as a service: A managed service that provides recovery infrastructure and assistance through a provider. It shifts some standby-system and recovery operations to an external provider.
Fault tolerance: The ability of a system to continue operating when some components fail. Fault tolerance handles failures in operation rather than restoring a disrupted environment.
Backup: A separate copy of data kept so it can be restored after loss or corruption. Backups provide a recovery source when production data is unavailable or damaged.
IT service management: The practices organizations use to design, deliver, operate, and improve IT services. Recovery planning protects services whose dependencies and owners are managed through these practices.

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