For most people, a backup is the go-to restoration point for their computer when catastrophe strikes. However, for an organisation much larger than an individual, backups are limited in how much they can help post-disaster.
The process of disaster recovery within organisations is a fully planned out process and aims to get your organisation up and running as quickly as possible. Both processes are important to ensure that whatever goes wrong, you can get up and running as quickly as possible.
In this blog, we’re going to go over the ins and outs of backups and disaster recovery, and why both are essential for any business.
Backing up your data is the process of duplicating your data and storing it elsewhere as a restoration point in the event of a system failure or catastrophe.
The data from a backup must be easily accessible for quick access to ensure easy recovery to mitigate downtime from system or infrastructure failure. This can be done in many forms — external drive storage, cloud backups, remote data centres, and storage arrays and partitions are just some of the diverse ways to ensure your data is backed up.
Backing up is more on an individual level than an infrastructural level. Duplicating your entire system infrastructure is a massive undertaking that will consume a mass of resources, so isn’t suitable for most organisations.
However, for individual employee devices and file systems, backups are a vital way of ensuring that everyone is covered in case of disaster.
There are multiple practices that you should employ when implementing backups throughout your organisation.
Disaster recovery is a more complex process to ensure that there’s a plan to protect your data and services against problems and restore them in the event of a catastrophe. Backups are a part of this, but a lot more goes into recovery than just creating backups.
Disaster recovery aims to get all aspects of your organisation up and running swiftly and effectively, to ensure as little disruption and downtime as possible in the case of disaster. This means that there is far more to consider about recovery strategy.
There are a lot of different things to consider when creating your disaster recovery plan. Here are a few of the best practices that are vital to ensuring that you lay the best foundation for your disaster recovery strategy —
Both backups and disaster recovery are crucial for any modern organisation. This is due to the different applications for which both methods account.
Backups are great for any individual within your organisation to have their data securely recoverable if their data or files become inaccessible. This accounts for device damage, data corruption, or anything else that could possibly disrupt the accessibility of any given individual’s data within your organisation. Restoring a single user’s data from a backup is quite simple and is regularly done by administrators worldwide.
Disaster recovery applies more so throughout your organisation, ensuring that there’s a plan in place for any system-wide failure or any disaster that could result in massive disruption or downtime throughout your organisation. Because of this, disaster recovery is vital — and backups are one of the components of disaster recovery.
Essentially, there is no single one that works. Disaster recovery and backups apply to various aspects of your organisation, and so ensuring that your organisation has both can be key to ensuring that your organisation is protected from disaster.
Backups and disaster recovery are both vital parts of any organisation’s action plan to mitigate disruption and downtime in the case of any personal or organisational failure regarding systems and devices. With effective backups and disaster recovery plans, your organisation will be prepared to battle anything.
If you’re looking to get started in working out your organisation’s best steps forward for disaster recovery, reach out to us today. Our expert team will be able to help ensure that your disaster recovery strategy is effective and works for your organisation’s needs.
Get in touch now and see how we can help your organisation.