“Understanding the essentials of backup and disaster recovery is critical for minimizing the impact of unplanned downtime on your business. Across industries, organizations recognize that downtime can quickly result in lost revenue. Unfortunately, natural disasters, human error, security breaches and ransomware attacks can all jeopardize the availability of IT resources. Any downtime can derail customer interactions, sap employee productivity, destroy data and halt business processes.” – IBM
Backup and recovery are two disparate concepts, but organizations should always run them together. You can have data backup without a disaster recovery plan, but not the other way around. If there are no data saved, there is nothing to recover.
Cloud backup and recovery is a service that will take care of copying and archiving files of the client on a remote server. The data are transmitted over a secure network to the cloud-based server. The cloud-based disaster recovery, on the other hand, is an infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which backs up the data on a remote server. It is recommended that you choose backup-as-a-service providers rather than rely on non-proprietary solutions to handle your data.
Both data backup and recovery have the same goals, and that is to ensure business continuity. There are four standard types of backup: full, incremental, differential, and mirror. A full backup is the most comprehensive, but it is also the slowest in terms of the backup time. Service providers typically recommend that organizations employ incremental backup in their systems. Disaster recovery, meanwhile, also employs several methods. Among the examples are RAID, hard drive, removable, optical, digital, and tape. The method used will depend upon the problem at hand.
IT outages are notoriously costly. According to Gartner, the average cost of downtown runs to $5,600 per minute, or more than $300,000 per hour. But another study by Avaya claimed that it could be as much as $540,000 per hour. It really depends on a number of factors. For instance, e-commerce sites stand to lose more compared to organizations that can still run offline. Data backup and recovery will ensure that you can resume operations almost immediately after a network failure.
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