What are Disaster Recovery Services?
For any business, whether it is an IT firm or otherwise, data is a key element for carrying out daily operations. So, it is important for businesses to have provisions for secure data storage and retrieval when required. Earlier when there were emergencies, the staff would typically have to travel to datacenters in off-site locations. But with technological advancements, computing platforms enabled the creation of highly scalable storage systems. This is how disaster recovery services came about and these are now the best alternative to internal IT teams.
Why are disaster recovery services important?
When data breaches occur, there are bound to be uncontrollable losses. This is why businesses have invested in quality disaster recovery services for handling situations like these. There are two types of solutions for recovery of data during disasters, namely, the traditional backup methods cloud based backup. The DRaaS or Disaster Recovery as a Service solutions are trustworthy because they can address issues of mobility, high performance, portability etc.
There are many reasons why disaster recovery services are important, the most important being the immediate and quick recovery of critical data when disasters occur. No one can predict when a crisis will take place and when one does happen; it is hard to deal with downtimes. Every second of downtime can cost your business huge revenue losses. But with disaster recovery services from reputed providers, you will not need to worry about downtimes affecting your business even when calamities occur.
The virtual DRaaS solutions will use of a scalable infrastructure whereby businesses can get virtual access to resources and there is negligible hardware-software expenses. This means that DRaaS will entail very less operational resources and this means cost savings for companies. Businesses can use up this saved funds for developing other areas in marketing like Research and Development.
Unlike traditional backup methods, DRaaS solutions are highly flexible. The disaster recovery services are able to provide multiple options to clients where it concerns handling various business systems. Depending on the kind of disaster like power outages or man-made disasters or server crashes, the company can decide on the disaster recovery solutions available.
How are disaster recovery services different from backup services?
Disaster recovery services are integral to any business and these are becoming all the more vital with the growing incidence of network outages and cyber breaches. Many decision makers tend to make a blunder by thinking that having data backups is enough for tackling disasters. The truth is that backing up of data is an important strategy no doubt, but it is not identical to a strategy for disaster recovery. It is part of a properly crafted disaster recovery plan. While the backup is copy of data, the DR plan is the insurance which guarantees that such data can be recovered.
While backups are performed usually on a day-to-day basis in order to guarantee data retention in one location, disaster recovery has to understand the RTO or Recovery Time Objective to decide the maximum time a business can do without IT after a disaster strikes. So, to meet RTO, there must be copy of data in at least another secondary site.
Backups are most useful for getting immediate access when you must restore data but these services cannot help in failover of the entire environment when the infrastructure itself is compromised. However, disaster recovery services offer failover for the main environment and create an alternate environment which can ensure business continuity.
Backups are merely copies of data which must be restored. DR will need a distinct production environment for storing data wherein all the aspects of the existing environment like software and hardware, security and connectivity must be considered.
Finally, backup processes can be planned easily because the only objective is to retain data for its recovery. But disaster recovery services have to undertake elaborate planning which includes indentifying systems that are mission-critical, creating recovery order and testing these.
