In recent years, federal, state, and local governments have faced unprecedented costs for disaster response and recovery efforts.
“The federal government obligated nearly $300 billion across numerous departments and agencies during fiscal years 2005 through 2014 for disaster assistance,” according to the Government Accountability Office. “Extreme disasters like hurricanes Katrina and Sandy caused billions of dollars in damage.”
The effects of these catastrophic storms and other disasters not only have immediate and direct impacts on citizens — such as damaged property or lost belongings — but they also have indirect consequences. When government employees don’t have access to functioning hardware and software applications, they can’t disseminate timely information, disburse benefits to citizens, defend the homeland, or otherwise carry out their missions.
That’s why disaster recovery should be top of mind for governments at all levels. Disaster recovery, or DR for short, is the documented processes and procedures for how your agency will recover from a disaster that impacts IT infrastructure. Whether the culprit is a natural or manmade disaster, your agency needs a way to quickly recover and resume mission-focused activities.
GovLoop teamed with NetApp, which specializes in cloud-based and on-premises enterprise data management solutions, and cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) to produce this report. In it, we explore the state of DR in government, current challenges, the benefits of moving DR to the cloud and how to do it, as well as best practices that agencies at all levels should consider when implementing their DR strategy.
