While the ultimate goal of both Disaster Recovery (DR) and Cyber Recovery(CR) is the same, to bring your IT services back online after an event, DR and CR differ in many ways. DR protects against physical disasters (such as flooding, earthquake, fire, terrorist attacks), user errors, and hardware malfunctions, while CR protects against cyber attacks.

Because of these differences, a DR site may not be able to provide the necessary function for restoring systems after a cyber attack. A Cyber Recovery site is needed to recover your systems from a cyber attack. A CR site is a vaulted site, containing replicated data of critical systems. It is isolated from the network and only connects during replication. A CR site doesn’t have to be in a geographically separate location (unlike a DR site), but it should be physically secured. In fact, it will be beneficial if it’s close to the primary Data Center to take advantage of a fast network connection.

DR usually supports most of the business operations (since disasters are usually bigger in magnitude), whereas CR supports only the most critical systems for operational recovery.

While IT admins have access to a DR site, a CR site should be restricted to a few select security folks.

Usually a DR site is also dormant, but a CR site will always have monitoring and analytics tool – checking for security breaches.

Many companies with mature IT infrastructure typically have a DR site. They also conduct regular DR tests. But most do not have a Cyber Recovery site yet. With the prevalence of cyber security attacks, it is high time for companies to install Cyber Recovery sites and conduct regular cyber recovery tests.