Knowing the basics of backup and disaster recovery is important when it comes to minimizing the effects of unexpected downtime on your company. Across different industries, companies know that downtime could immediately lead to lost revenue. Unfortunately, human error, natural disasters, as well as ransomware attacks may jeopardize the IT resources’ availability. Downtimes could decrease employee productivity, stop business processes, and derail client interactions.
Assessing different deployment technologies and options, defining crucial key term, as well disaster recovery could assist you in creating effective strategies for preventing the results of downtime.
Understanding backup and disaster recovery?
There is an essential difference between backup and disaster recovery. When you say backup, it is the process of creating extra copies of data. Whenever you do this, you protect the data. You may have to restore backup data in case you come across database corruption, accidental deletion, or issues with a software upgrade.
Meanwhile, disaster recovery has something to do with the planning and process for immediately re-establishing the accessibility of applications, IT resources, and data following an outage. That plan may include switching over to the redundant storage units and servers until your main data center is up and running again.
Why Is Planning Important?
You should never ignore backup and disaster recovery. If you need several hours to get back data that may have been lost following an accidental deletion, your partners and clients will do nothing, and unable to finish processes that are critical to your business operations, especially those that depend on technology.
And it case it takes days to get your system back up and running following a disaster, you may be at risk of losing customers permanently. Given the money and time you may lose in these cases, investing in backup and disaster recovery are totally justified.
Important Key Terms
Knowing a few important terms could help you in making strategic decisions. It also lets you evaluate your back up and disaster recovery methods.
Recovery Time Objective – is the time you need to recover your company’s normal business operations following an outage. If you are setting your RTO, you have to take into account the amount of time you are willing to lose as well as how that time would affect your organization’s bottom line. The RTO may differ significantly from one business to another.
Recovery Point Objective – it refers to the data that you could afford to lose in light of a disaster. You may be required to copy the data to a remote data center all the time so that in case there is an outage, it won’t lead to data loss. Or you may also choose to lose five minutes or an hour worth of data.
Failover – it is a disaster recovery process that involves offloading tasks to your backup systems automatically in such a way that’s seamless to the users. You may fail over from the main data center to your secondary site, using redundant systems that are all set to take over right away.
Failback – it is the process of disaster recovery that involves switching back to its original systems. When the disaster is over and your main data center is up and running, it’s important for you to have the ability to fail back seamlessly.
Restore – it involves transferring the backup data to the data system or the main center. This process is considered as a part of the backup rather than the disaster recovery.
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a managed method for disaster recovery. The hosting and management of the infrastructure will be handled by a third party. The infrastructure that’s being handled is used for disaster recovery related processes. It also allows firms to have those processes to be managed for them.
Prioritize Workloads
Once you’ve have a good understanding of the important concepts about disaster and recovery, it is time to use them on your workloads. Several companies have several RPOs and RTOs that show the importance of every workload to their business.
Check Deployment Options
The next thing when it comes to creating a disaster recovery plan is to check deployment options. Do you need to keep back up data or disaster recovery functions on premises? Do you need a hybrid cloud or public cloud approach?
Cloud
Cloud based backup and disaster recovery methods are gaining in popularity these days among companies of different sizes. Several cloud solutions offer the infrastructure needed to store data and in some instances, the required tools to manage the backup and the disaster recovery solutions.
On-Premises
In certain instances, keeping some backup and disaster recovery processes on site or on premises could assist you in retrieving data and recovering the IT services immediately. By having some sensitive data within the premises may seem attractive when you have to follow strict data privacy as well as data sovereignty rules.
Technologies
Based on which deployment options you select, you may have different alternatives for the kinds of processes and technology that you use for backup as well as for disaster recovery.
