When you first come across ‘backups’ and ‘disaster recovery’, it might appear that they seem to fulfil the same function. However, knowing the difference between these two – and how they relate! – can be a key piece of knowledge that can help you in the case of a security breach or other technological issues.
It’s useful to think of backups and disaster recovery in terms of a Venn diagram: backups are separate from but can be included within the larger umbrella of disaster recovery processes. Backup protects your information in the unfortunate event of theft, loss, or other technological failures, and can come in both physical and cloud-based formats. In contrast, a disaster recovery plan is the larger term for the steps and processes involved in reacting to a software/hardware/network failure, such as switching to a different network server, or taking your backups online. It doesn’t have to be a full-scale “disaster” for your recovery plan to be relevant and useful – being offline or non-functional costs businesses £4025 per minute or £215,000 per hour on average. So, let’s look at both of these in detail, and explore what might be the best types of backups vs disaster recovery plans for you.
Backups
The first stages of backup preparation are fairly straightforward – you simply need to ascertain what needs backing up, how long it’s needed for, and how often it needs backing up. Nowadays, many businesses opt for automatic backups, taking the responsibility and stress off human hands.
However, you also need to consider some other factors which can affect the types of back plans that you use.
– How much of your data needs backing up, and what kind of data is it?
– What is the infrastructure you’ll be backing up from?
– How quickly would you need your data back again?
– And, importantly, what’s your budget?
There are two different categories of backup solutions, but most companies prefer to use a combination of both physical and cloud-based options to cover their bases as completely as possible. This means that in the event of server outages with a cloud-based provider or physical damage to physical copies on site your data will still be safe and you will be able to access a copy of it at any point.
Disaster Recovery
As mentioned above, Disaster Recovery is more than simply having a backup, although backups form a key part of most disaster recovery plans. At its simplest, disaster recovery simply involves having a plan and set of technical solutions in place that will enable the nexus of your business to continue functioning in the case of any issues. In order to make this plan, the first step is to identify the central systems that your business uses to keep running in order to prevent them from being disabled in the event that your normal infrastructure is taken offline.
While disaster recovery plans are as individual as the businesses that use them, you can consider these five steps to help you create your own. If you’d like to talk this through with a professional, however, our friendly team of experts are happy to help.
- Identify the systems that your organisation can’t function without
- Work out how long your business could function with each of your key systems offline
- Establish if your business could stand to lose any data and, if so, how much.
- Choose whether your disaster recovery plan would kick in manually or automatically.
- Decide how the disaster recovery system would then hand back to normal function once the threat has passed.
If you’re confused about or would simply like to find out how your business could benefit from formal backup and disaster recovery protocolsBackup vs disaster recovery, why not contact one of our team here. And if you’re still not sure? Why not read more advice, tips, and tricks on the Corona IT blog.
