Why Backup is Not Disaster Recovery

While most companies today backup at least some of their data, many of these organizations do not have a solid disaster recovery plan. Why is that? Some believe that if they are backing up their data then they have disaster recovery (or DR) covered. All it would take is one significant data loss event to painfully illustrate that they were wrong. According to FEMA, 40% of businesses that close due to natural disaster (or the like) never reopen.

Disaster recovery is a topic which should interest all businesses, regardless of size or yearly revenue. However, as with backups, DR is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Here are a few reasons why backup is not the same as disaster recovery:

 
• Service levels, recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives – Traditionally, backups are run once per day, typically at night. This means that the data stored via the backup may not represent up-to-the-minute changes.  Potentially, this could lead to some amount of data loss should the need arise to rebuild a virtual machine from the backup for example.  With cloud-based backup & local storage, your company could enjoy continuous backups and multiple restore points.
 
• Application impact, performance and backup window – Backups take time and resources but recovery from a backup takes even more time and resources.  If you are attempting to recover data from a tape, this process could take days.  From disk, recovery would be a bit faster, maybe hours if the disk is at hand, but that is still expensive downtime. Cloud backup with local copy quickly restores data regardless of your location, including the ability to recover individual files (still the most common type of data recovery).
 
• Retention and replication – Backups are typically stored for a significant length of time for compliance and audit purposes. RenovoData offers multi-tiered cloud-based storage which means that you pay less to store older or infrequently accessed data. Additionally, RenovoData gives clients the ability to have many thousands of versions of a single file. With a traditional static backup, the organization will have only one snapshot in time of an application and associated data.

RenovoData’s cloud-based backup, recovery and restore solutions takes advantage of the client’s existing infrastructure to provide an unobtrusive and transparent solution. This cloud-based backup software integrates with IT environments to locate and prioritize files for backup, and then securely transmits encrypted copies of those files to offsite data centers. Built-in scalability of cloud-based backups makes it easy to evolve as your business data environment grows and changes.      

It is important to regard backups as an important element of, but not a replacement for, disaster recovery. Companies should always backup their data with recovery in mind.  The recovery environment should reflect the organizations’ production and operating environment.  Disasters can and do happen, NOW is the best time to get prepared!  

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