Backup and Disaster Recovery, both go hand in hand when planning and designing an effective business continuity plan. IT being the backbone of any business, any disruption to it massively impacts your business. For smooth IT & business operations, it is imperative that every organisation must opt for a business continuity plan as a precautionary measure, because disasters do not discriminate – they hit you as severely as anyone else.
What is the difference between Backup and Disaster Recovery?
Backup Solution: Backup helps to create a duplicate set of your data and eases the road to recovery in case you encounter an inadvertent data error or corruption, system failure or any other disaster. The main function of Backup is to protect data by creating multiple copies as archives.
Disaster Recovery (DR): It involves a detailed strategy for responding to a disaster, putting the backups into action, recovering the entire system with minimal or no downtime. Disaster Recovery is essential for your critical business operations in a scenario when there is complete disruption to the systems, the operations can be recovered quickly from the replica site until your primary data centre is back up & running. It is just like maintaining a complete duplicate environment of your IT Infrastructure in the cloud or on different premises for continuous data replication, instant system up run, primary site failover with fast RTO and shorter RPO.
Types of Backup Solutions
- Full Backup– It creates a copy of all your data including which has been previously backed up.
- Incremental Backup– Only copies the data which has changed since your last backup.
- Differential Backup– It backs up the data which has changed since your last full backup.
- Mirror Backup– As the name suggests; mirror backup is the exact replica of your backup. It does not include the changes. If a file is corrupted or deleted, the same will happen in the backup.
- Local or On-site Backup– The backups are kept on-premise, the same place where you have your data. The data is vulnerable as there is no backup in some other location.
- Offsite Backup– It is the same as On-site backups, however, divided between different locations. So, if you encounter a disaster or system failure at one location, your data is still not lost.
- Cloud Backup– The data is backed up off-site and stored in one or more remote locations. The cloud service providers ensure multiple connections to the data, securing it from any physical damage which minimizes any risk of data loss.
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Backup– In the FTP Backup, the data is transferred over the internet from a device to a dedicated FTP server.
Understanding a few essential terms when it comes to Disaster Recovery can help shape your strategic decisions and enable you to better evaluate backup and disaster recovery solutions.
- Recovery time objective (RTO)– After a system outage, the amount of time it takes to recover the business operations is referred as RTO. In other words, how much downtime your business can tolerate or how much revenue you’re willing to lose.
- Recovery point objective (RPO)– It is the amount of data you can afford to lose in an outage. If you copy your data to a remote data centre continuously, there will be no data loss. If not, then you may want to decide and know how many minutes or hours of data you can actually afford to lose without much impact on your business.
- Failover– It is the disaster recovery process of automatically offloading operations from the primary centre to secondary location in a way that is seamless to users.
- Failback– It is the process of switching back to the original systems at the primary location after the disaster has passed. Once your primary data centre is back up and running, you should be able to fail back seamlessly as well.
- Restore– It is the process of transferring backup data to your primary data
Now, when we know these two terms, Backup and DR are not the same, there is no choice between the two. Backup alone is not sufficient. Backup is a just a part of Disaster Recovery Solution, where in you not only need to plan for data recovery but also plan to connect the IT systems and restart the critical applications in case your IT infrastructure is disrupted.
Why wait for a Disaster to happen?
By investing in a business continuity plan, you can immune your business from the risk of losing critical data and minimize the losses in case of any disaster. It also gives you a competitive advantage ensuring your IT infrastructure is safe, even in the most demanding situations. Opting a complete secure solution acts as a safeguard for your critical business operations and ensures no data loss at all times.
By opting for a Disaster Recovery Solution, you can save huge amount of the capital investment for your infrastructure as well as the costs of managing and monitoring the setup. Also, you mitigate the risk of any regional disaster as your environment is duplicated and accessible in different geographical locations.
Progression comes with a flawless experience of over two decades in Managed IT & Cloud Services and aims to assess, consult and optimize the resources so that you’re continually on a growth part in terms of your core strength and gain competitive edge.
Reach us today for a quick assessment of the health of your IT Infrastructure & Disaster Recovery Plan.