What is disaster recovery?
Disaster recovery refers to the strategies and procedures used to recover critical systems and data after a disruption. By having a structured recovery plan in place, businesses can reduce data loss, maintain operations, and limit financial damage.
In the modern world of business, we rely heavily on technology – both hardware and software. When something goes wrong with this technology, it can cause massive delays in productivity and potential loss of income for your business. This is where disaster recovery comes in.
It’s essentially a system put in place to get you back up and running again with as little downtime as possible should your software or hardware crash. It protects all of your mission-critical systems so that you don’t have to spend hours fixing the problem before you can get on with working again. Your workload can be instantly switched (failed over) from a corrupted machine to a virtual machine.
At Netgen, we recently tested out our disaster recovery offering with a client. Using Acronis DR Cloud, we created a virtual machine for DebtSource. In the test, we were able to bring their production environment back into operation in under 25 minutes. This is made possible through the high-performance storage hosted at the Acronis Disaster Recovery Data Centre created by our developers.
Key differences between a traditional backup and disaster recovery
- Why you use each
Both types of backups will keep your business operational should a system or some hardware become corrupted. However, they do not do the same thing. A traditional backup is for business documents and other company data that can live on a hard drive or cloud server. This backup protects your business from data loss. Disaster Recovery, on the other hand, is for protection of your critical systems. This should be set up to deploy quickly so that you can get operational again if something crashes.
- How often you use each
A traditional backup is something you should be doing on a daily basis, if not more often. Documents can be backed up every time they get used or updated. Disaster recovery is something you only need to set up once and update if a system in your operations changes. You will also only need to access this backup in an emergency.
- How quickly you recover information
The name disaster recovery implies that it is ready to roll out in an instant and it should be. If you have a solution in place, you need it to be able to take over from a corrupted or broken system in minutes. A traditional backup can take anywhere from a few minutes to several days to recover, depending on your storage solution. While this can be frustrating, it isn’t a huge problem as the point of the backup is to ensure you don’t lose information and not to prevent downtime in operations.
- The infrastructure required
The infrastructure for disaster recovery is more complex than is often used for traditional backups. This is due to how quickly you need to be able to access the system. You would usually have high-performance offsite storage, plus the appropriate network resources and orchestration software. A traditional backup can simply be done on an external hard drive that gets taken home with you every day.
Do you need disaster recovery for your business?
If you have any applications, databases, or websites that require high availability and you simply cannot afford it to be unreachable, then disaster recovery is for you. Contact us for more details today.
