Disaster Recovery as a Service offers additional protection for your business compared to traditional Backup services. Although each service is important to have – there are defining differences in each that set them apart.
While the combination of today’s pressures promotes a variety of unique challenges for businesses and IT, both end up looking at different sides of the same coin with a common desire: To achieve the right level of application and data availability. So, what is Disaster Recovery (DR) and how does it help organizations protect their data and applications? At its simplest, disaster recovery is rapid, secure recovery of your data, applications, and systems. DR uses continuous data protection to copy data changes from your production environment to a second site. In case of a disaster or business disruption, you can then recover the latest iteration to your production site or failover to the recovery environment to get back up and running in near real-time.
On the other hand, Backup is the process of creating an extra copy or multiple copies of data to help protect from accidental data deletion, corruption, or a problematic software upgrade. Many organizations assume that if they have backups of all their data, they can recover, but fail to consider how much data they might lose between backups or the cost of downtime while their backups are restored. This assumption can be more disastrous than the disaster that strikes your data center.
Backup: Typically creates copies on a daily basis to ensure data retention at a single location.
Disaster Recovery: Uses recovery time objective to determine the maximum length of time the business can withstand without its systems, typically requiring a duplicate data center location.
Backup: Does not account for the physical resources to bring data online.
Disaster Recovery: Makes provision for an alternate environment capable of sustaining your business until your primary environment is back up and running.
Backup: Requires additional storage to make copies of your data so you can restore it back to the original source.
Disaster Recovery: Requires an alternative production environment where the data can live and run as it would in your primary environment – including physical resources, software, connectivity and security.
Backup: Does not include a recovery plan or orchestration technology.
Disaster Recovery: Requires planning and a comprehensive runbook identifying which systems are considered mission critical, a recovery order, communication process and a way to perform a valid test.
Contact us today to discover how to fully protect your sensitive data with Disaster Recovery as a Service.
Define the Difference
