IT- Disaster Recovery for a Business Continuity

IT  disaster  recovery  consists  of  developing  step-by-step  procedures  for  a  full recovery, disaster avoidance and business continuity.

When many think about DR, they usually think about Backup, while it is only one piece in BC-DR puzzle and inefficient for a continuity of business operations in an event of a disaster.

Backup is not disaster recovery (DR) based on following points:

• Failure of backup software
• Service Levels: backups typically happen twice per day which means that a RTO will be significantly higher and RPO could be ~12 hours data loss which is not acceptable for critical applications in DR concept.
• Reverse Replication: in an event of an outage, once an application has been made available on a target site, you must extend that application’s protection to include new data being created. A backup solution can not start taking backups and ship them back to a production site, yet a DR solution will ensure that an application is still protected by replicating back to a source site.
• Application Impact: backups occur at night because, making a copy of an application and its data load a CPU on a server and impacts significantly end-user productivity.

Every institution large or small should have both a backup mechanism and disaster recovery solution in place; they are complementary pieces to a same puzzle.