Backup And Disaster Recovery

By understanding the significance of backup disaster recovery, businesses will be able to plan for unplanned downtime. As many of us know, downtime can lead to a loss in revenue. Natural disasters such as breaches in security, ransomware attacks, and other scenarios can severely impact the bandwidth of IT resources. Downtime affects consumer engagement, employee productivity, destroys data, and disrupts the routine’s of businesses. In order to understand how backup and disaster recovery come into play, it’s important to know the distinction between the two terms.

Backup is the process of making an extra copy or several copies of precious data. Backing up is meant to protect the data in the event of something occurring. Users will benefit from backups if they’ve accidentally deleted something, encountered a corrupt database, or it can be due to software/hardware issues. Disaster recovery refers to the plans and processes that will allow others to access applications, data, and other resources that were previously lost following the outage. These plans can involve switching over to an alternative set of servers and storage systems until your main data center is up and running. Many organizations are coming to realize that backing up data is simply not enough to protect all of your business’ assets. By having a disaster recovery plan in place.

Why You Need To Create A Plan

Most organizations can’t afford to overlook the importance of backups and disaster recovery plans. Ordinarily, if it takes you and your associates hours and hours to recover the lost data that was unintentionally deleted, the employees will be on standby and will not be able to carry out their day to day tasks. As a result, this increases the likelihood of losing customers and revenue. That is why making a sound investment in these resources will serve your business for when it needs it the most.

Key Terms To Know For Evaluating Backup And Disaster Recovery Solutions

The following terms are useful for businesses that are working towards crafting a comprehensive disaster recovery plan:

  • Recovery Time Objective (RTO): This is the amount of time that it takes to recover your business operations after an outage has occurred. When setting up your RTO, it’s important to evaluate how much time you’re going to lose and the effects that it will have on your bottom lines. The RTO will vary, depending on the business model.
  • Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Refers to the data that you can afford to lose in the event of a disaster. RPOs might require that you periodically copy the data to a remote data center, so that the outage won’t result in losing more data.
  • Failback: Involves switching back to the original systems. Once the disaster is behind you and the main data center is functioning, you’ll be able to fail back with ease.
  • Failover: Disaster recovery process which involves offloading tasks to backup systems in such a way that is convenient for consumers. There’s a chance you can fail due to the engagement from the primary data center to a secondary site, making way for the redundant systems to take over, effective immediately.
  • Restore: Transferring backup data to the primary data center. The restoration process is part of backup.
  • Disaster Recovery as a service (DRaaS): A managed approach for disaster recovery. A third party will manage and host the infrastructure that is used for disaster recovery. Certain DRaaS offerings can provide tools to handle the disaster recovery process or they can enable organizations to oversee these processes on their behalf.

Managing The Workloads

Now that you have a better understanding of the core concepts and terms, the next step is to apply it to your workloads. A variety of companies have access to several RTOS and RPOS which reflects the workload that is unique to every business. Take the banking industry as an example. Major banks might have a heavy workload, meaning it’s more of a priority to minimize the possibility of time and loss of data. The best thing that powerhouses like the banking industry can do is define the workloads based on sets of tier rankings (tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3). This can be very useful and serve as a guideline for developing a framework for a disaster recovery plan. The next phase in putting together a functional disaster recovery plan is to evaluate your options for deployment.

Cloud Based Backups

Cloud-based backups are soaring in popularity for all industries. Cloud solutions are providing the infrastructure needed to store data and they can effectively manage backup and disaster recovery processes. When using cloud-based backups, you can avoid the hassle of capital investments and the additional costs of managing the environment. These implementations will aid with scalability and assist in keeping tracking of the geographic distance, in the event of a regional disaster. Cloud solutions are capable of supporting both on-site operations and cloud-based production environments. You can opt to store backup or replicated data in a cloud, while resuming the production in your own data center. This hybrid approach allows you to scale, without going through the hassle of moving your production environment. With cloud to cloud models.

On-Site Operations

For certain situations, keeping disaster recovery initiatives on-site can help in retrieving data and quickly recovering your IT services. Keeping some of the more sensitive data on-site is ideal for those who need to adhere to data privacy/data sovereignty rules and regulations. Having said that, it’s important to note that conducting these matters on the job site can be difficult at times. Should a natural disaster or outage occur, your primary and secondary systems would take a hit. Many disaster recovery strategies will rely on a secondary site that is a good distance away from the primary data center.

Types of Technologies

This will vary, depending on the deployment option that you select. The following are examples of the types of technologies that are available to use:

  • Traditional Tape: Having been around for quite some time, magnetic tape storage can play a pivotal role in your backup plans. Tape solutions allow businesses to store a plethora of data, all while being a reliable and cost-effective choice. Tape has its place, but it’s not the most common when it comes to disaster recovery. It’s not quick for those who need to have fast access to their disk-based storage files.
  • Continuous Replication: Continuous replication allows for copies of disks and applications to continuously replicate to another location within the cloud. This method will help to mitigate downtime and it provides more consistent recovery points.
  • Snapshot-Based Applications: With this approach, you will be able to capture the current state of an application or disk at any point in time. You get the best of both worlds as it can protect your data while conserving storage space, simultaneously. Your data is only as complete based on your last snapshot.

Be Proactive When Faced With Challenges

Most organizations need a strategy in place to preserve the health and wellness of their business. Our team at RHYNO Networks will evaluate which options are suitable for the well-being of your organization. Don’t wait until an emergency comes to enforce these strategies. Backup and disaster recovery plans will help if they have been designed and tested ahead of time in anticipation of grim situations.