A Glossary of Core Disaster Recovery Terminology for HR & Recruiting Professionals
In today’s fast-paced HR and recruiting landscape, data is king. From applicant tracking systems (ATS) to employee records in your CRM, the integrity and availability of this information are critical for seamless operations, compliance, and ultimately, your organization’s success. A single data disaster—whether a cyberattack, system failure, or natural event—can bring recruitment processes to a halt, compromise sensitive employee data, and lead to significant financial and reputational damage. Understanding core disaster recovery terminology isn’t just for IT; it’s essential for HR and recruiting leaders to proactively protect their vital information assets and ensure business continuity. This glossary provides key definitions tailored to help you navigate the complexities of safeguarding your HR and recruiting data.
Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is a comprehensive, documented strategy that outlines the procedures and processes an organization will follow to restore its IT infrastructure and operations after a disruptive event. For HR and recruiting, a DRP specifically addresses how critical systems like ATS, HRIS, CRM, payroll, and background check platforms will be brought back online. It details responsibilities, communication protocols, and the sequence of steps required to minimize downtime and data loss. An effective DRP ensures that, even if primary systems are compromised, HR can quickly regain access to applicant data, employee records, and active recruitment pipelines, preventing significant operational paralysis and maintaining critical talent acquisition efforts.
Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
While often used interchangeably with DRP, a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a broader strategic framework designed to ensure an organization can continue to function during and after a disaster, not just focused on IT. For HR and recruiting, a BCP considers how to maintain essential services like candidate communication, new hire onboarding, and employee support even if physical offices are inaccessible or key systems are down. It includes strategies for alternative work arrangements, emergency communication systems, and manual workarounds for critical processes. A BCP for HR ensures that essential human capital functions continue, allowing the business to retain its ability to recruit, hire, and manage its workforce, protecting productivity and organizational resilience.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) refers to the maximum acceptable duration of time that an application or system can be down after a disaster before significant damage occurs. For HR and recruiting, defining RTOs is crucial for systems like your ATS, CRM (e.g., Keap, HighLevel), or HRIS, which might hold active job applications, interview schedules, or onboarding workflows. A short RTO means these systems must be restored very quickly to avoid missing critical hiring windows, delaying candidate communications, or impacting payroll processing. Establishing clear RTOs helps prioritize which systems get restored first and guides the investment in appropriate recovery technologies, ensuring that the most vital recruiting and HR functions resume operation promptly.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, measured in time, that an organization can sustain during a disaster. For HR and recruiting, this directly relates to how much applicant data, employee records, offer letters, or other sensitive information you can afford to lose. An RPO of four hours, for instance, means you can lose up to four hours of data. This dictates the frequency of your data backups. If your RPO is near zero, continuous data replication is often required for systems holding highly dynamic data, such as a CRM with constantly updated candidate notes or an onboarding portal. A well-defined RPO ensures that even after a system failure, the recovered HR and recruiting data is current enough to prevent significant disruption to ongoing operations.
Data Backup
Data backup involves creating copies of data so that these copies can be used to restore the original data after a data loss event. In HR and recruiting, this typically includes backing up your ATS database, CRM records (candidate profiles, interaction logs), employee files, payroll data, and any documents related to hiring or compliance. Effective backup strategies involve regular, automated backups to secure, offsite locations. For CRMs like Keap or HighLevel, regular exports of contact, company, and opportunity data are crucial. Automation plays a key role here, ensuring backups occur consistently without manual intervention, which reduces human error and ensures that a recent, clean copy of all vital HR and recruiting data is always available for restoration.
Data Redundancy
Data redundancy refers to the practice of storing the same data in multiple locations or on multiple storage devices to protect against data loss in the event of hardware failure or system outage. For HR and recruiting, this means ensuring critical data—like applicant tracking details, employee contracts, or performance reviews—isn’t reliant on a single point of failure. This can involve RAID configurations for local servers, mirroring databases, or replicating data across different cloud regions. Implementing data redundancy minimizes the risk that a localized issue will render vital HR and recruiting information inaccessible, ensuring continuous access to the information needed for hiring, onboarding, and employee management. It’s a fundamental component of a robust disaster recovery strategy.
Cloud Backup
Cloud backup involves transmitting and storing copies of an organization’s data on remote servers hosted by a third-party cloud provider. For HR and recruiting, this is an increasingly popular and secure method for protecting sensitive information such as candidate resumes, employee PII, and offer letters stored in an ATS, CRM, or HRIS. Cloud solutions offer scalability, accessibility from anywhere, and often built-in redundancy and encryption. This eliminates the need for expensive on-premise hardware and provides a crucial offsite copy, safeguarding data against local disasters like fires or floods. Automating cloud backups ensures that HR and recruiting departments always have access to current, protected data, facilitating quick recovery and business continuity regardless of physical location.
On-Premise Backup
On-premise backup refers to storing copies of an organization’s data on servers or storage devices located within the organization’s physical facilities. For HR and recruiting, this might involve backing up local files, databases from an on-premise HRIS, or CRM data to local network-attached storage (NAS) or tape drives. While offering quick recovery times for minor local issues, on-premise backups are vulnerable to site-specific disasters such as fires, floods, or power outages that could destroy both the primary data and its local backups. Many modern HR and recruiting operations combine on-premise backups (for speed) with cloud backups (for offsite security and disaster resilience) to create a comprehensive, hybrid data protection strategy.
Replication
Replication is the process of continuously copying data from a primary location to a secondary location in near real-time. Unlike periodic backups, replication maintains an almost identical, up-to-date copy of data, significantly reducing the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to minutes or even seconds. For HR and recruiting, this is critical for highly dynamic systems like an active ATS, a CRM with constant candidate interactions, or a payroll system where even a few minutes of lost data could be catastrophic. If the primary system fails, the replicated data can be quickly activated at the secondary site through a failover process, ensuring minimal disruption to recruiting workflows, onboarding, and employee management, making it ideal for high-availability requirements.
Failover
Failover is an automated process that seamlessly switches to a redundant or standby system, server, or network when the primary system fails or becomes unavailable. The goal is to minimize downtime and maintain continuous operation without human intervention. For HR and recruiting, failover might apply to critical systems like a live ATS, an integration hub (e.g., Make.com) that connects various HR tools, or even your primary CRM like Keap or HighLevel. If the main server hosting these applications goes down, an automated failover ensures that a duplicate system takes over almost instantly. This protects against service interruptions that could halt candidate screening, interview scheduling, or the flow of vital HR data between systems, ensuring uninterrupted business processes.
System Restoration
System restoration is the process of bringing a computer system, application, or dataset back to an operational state after an outage or data loss event. This involves using backup copies of data and configuration files to rebuild or recover the affected system. For HR and recruiting, successful system restoration means quickly bringing back online your ATS, HRIS, CRM, or any other platform critical for talent acquisition and management. The efficiency of restoration depends heavily on the quality of your backups and the clarity of your Disaster Recovery Plan. A well-tested restoration process ensures that sensitive employee and candidate data, along with vital recruiting workflows, are quickly made accessible, minimizing the impact on HR operations and business continuity.
Data Integrity
Data integrity refers to the overall accuracy, completeness, and consistency of data throughout its lifecycle. In HR and recruiting, maintaining data integrity is paramount for sensitive information like candidate applications, employee personal details, payroll records, and performance data. Corrupted or inconsistent data can lead to compliance issues, incorrect hiring decisions, errors in compensation, and significant operational inefficiencies. Disaster recovery efforts must prioritize not just restoring data, but ensuring that the restored data is accurate and uncorrupted. Automation tools can help monitor data integrity during backups and replication, and robust recovery processes verify data consistency post-restoration, guaranteeing that HR and recruiting professionals are always working with reliable information.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity encompasses the practices, technologies, and processes designed to protect computer systems, networks, and data from digital attacks. For HR and recruiting, cybersecurity is not just an IT concern but a fundamental aspect of data disaster prevention. Protecting sensitive candidate PII, employee records, and proprietary business data from ransomware, phishing, and data breaches is critical. A strong cybersecurity posture reduces the likelihood of a data disaster that would necessitate recovery. This includes robust firewalls, multi-factor authentication, employee training on phishing recognition, and regular security audits of HR systems. Integrating cybersecurity measures into your HR automation protects your data before a disaster strikes, reducing recovery efforts and safeguarding trust.
Incident Response
Incident response is a structured approach an organization takes to manage and contain the aftermath of a security breach or cyberattack. For HR and recruiting, an incident could involve a data breach exposing candidate resumes, an unauthorized access to employee records, or a ransomware attack encrypting the ATS. A robust incident response plan outlines the steps for identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident analysis. It specifies who to notify (internally and externally, e.g., legal, PR, affected individuals), how to secure affected systems, and how to restore operations. Prompt and effective incident response minimizes damage, ensures compliance with data privacy regulations, and helps maintain the trust of employees and candidates during a crisis.
Immutable Backup
Immutable backup refers to a type of data backup that, once created, cannot be altered, overwritten, or deleted. This “write once, read many” (WORM) characteristic makes immutable backups a powerful defense against ransomware attacks and accidental deletions, as even malicious actors or internal errors cannot corrupt the backup copies. For HR and recruiting, immutable backups are invaluable for protecting sensitive data like employee records, contracts, and compliance documentation. If your primary HRIS or CRM data becomes encrypted by ransomware, an immutable backup ensures you have a pristine, uncorrupted copy available for restoration. It provides the ultimate last line of defense, guaranteeing data availability and integrity even in the face of sophisticated cyber threats.
If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: HR & Recruiting CRM Data Disaster Recovery Playbook: Keap & High Level Edition
