Restoring your company data: The Basic Difference between Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR)
Big Data has changed the workplace in many ways. According to tech giants IBM there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. A company’s data is their most valuable asset, without it they have no business. As a result, companies must do all in their power to protect themselves against data loss. After-all, downtime is expensive; it leads to lost revenue, lost productivity, can prove costly to recover not to mention its’ negative impacts on your business’ reputation. Research from the Aberdeen Group found, one hour of downtime can cost small companies as much as €7,000; that’s approx. €68,500 for mid-size businesses & over €640,000 per hour for large enterprises. Further research shows that 90% of companies losing data from a disaster are forced to shut down within 2 years.
Businesses are now having to search for methods of storage which are more expansive and flexible than ever before. We are seeing shift with SMEs from a data storage focus to a focus on finding effective sorting methods. This is because businesses now need help constructively utilising all the data that’s being collected.
Backups and Disaster Recovery: Understanding the difference
Often we cannot predict a disaster. The value of backups is becoming more and more prominent. Research carried out by IBM also shows that 70% of businesses have already or will experience data loss due to accidental deletion, disk or system failure, viruses or some other disaster. Data Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) are two very important and functionally different components of any layered IT security strategy. With the right Disaster Recovery Cloud, your business can survive anything.
Before we dive into the difference between the two and why they go hand in hand it’s important to start with definitions.
Backups
Broken down to its simplest, Backup is the act of securing data both locally and remotely. Backups serve to recover data in the event of a disaster be it deletion or corruption.
As tech experts, we at Landmark Technologies know that data backups are a key component to keeping data safe and retrievable. Almost half of all businesses use more than one form of backup solutions, which is something we advise for all of our clients. For instance, backing up to a server and the cloud, ensures that if either is compromised, you still have an emergency data reservoir.
Disaster Recovery (DR)
Disaster Recovery is a strategic security planning model that involves a set of policies, tools and procedures with the aim of maintaining critical functions and protecting an organisation before, during and after a disaster. A good DR plan will therefore include a variety of well-integrated tactics to keep data safe and cause minimal disruption to business continuity.
Leveraging the Difference between Backup and Disaster Recovery
From the above definitions you can see that the two are not synonymous Backup is not equal to Disaster Recovery. Neither one cannot be ignored, they both need to work cohesively to support business continuity. Understandably many people don’t grasp the difference between both. Yet the distinction is crucial to building a resilient business strategy.
Being able to backup is only one part of the equation and while ensuring that you take clean, regular backups of all your systems is essential, these backups have no value if you cannot restore quickly and easily.
Understanding the difference between Disaster Recovery and Backups comes down to understanding the difference between a strategy (DR) and a solution (backup). Are you aligning your backup policy with your DR strategy? Do you know who is responsible for restoring backups online? Do you know how you will respond to clients in the event of a breach? How will you recover from hardware failure or a ransomware attack?
Landmark Technologies can tailor a backup & disaster recovery strategy for your business. Contact us today to understand how Landmark Technologies’ Backup & Disaster Recovery products (BDR) can help you.
Hungry for knowledge, what are you waiting for? Sign up today
[email-subscribers-form id=”1″]
