Backups vs. Disaster Recovery. What’s the difference?
It is important to have a backup solution in place. Backups protect your data in case of a disaster, but don’t get caught up on the term “disaster” and believe it has to be major incident. Losing data is a disaster by itself and it can happen through something as simple as an employee deleting an important file, a lost or stolen laptop, or a technical issue such as a crashed hard drive or power outage. The unfortunate reality of backups is that they do not ensure quick recovery when a disaster occurs – it only ensures that the data is stored somewhere and can be accessed eventually, and there can be even more disastrous consequences if the data is not restored in a reasonable time.
In the case of a disaster, time is critical. Data loss and downtime means a business can’t serve its customers, potentially leading to thousands of dollars of lost revenue. Disaster recovery means having a plan and being able to implement it quickly and efficiently so that your business is running smoothly again within an hour, if not minutes. Therefore, the major advantage of a disaster recovery plan is that you are able to recover faster and not have to wait for the backups to be retrieved and the data to be slowly copied.
There are a lot of benefits to a disaster recovery plan.
First off, disaster recovery technologies can allow your employees to continue to work during a disaster while you work on fixing the problem with the original network. Once the emergency has passed, you can fail everything back to the production network as it should be, when the time is best for you, outside of business hours. Another benefit is that test scenarios can be run to ensure everything is working properly without interrupting the flow of your business. If the data cannot be easily transferred quickly and accurately, then your people can take the time to fix any problems before a real emergency happens. This also ensures that your people are skilled and ready to handle the job of recovering your data.
If you want to know how a disaster recovery plan could be implemented for your company, call NetLink Solutions for a free evaluation at 918-893-9520 or find out more at http://www.nlsit.com/it-services