Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery vs. Backup: Where do you Stand?

nScaled joined Spiceworks three months ago. Cool crowd, great discussions, and good spirit of competition between vendors. Acronis, of course, has been there much longer and has a very strong following. It’s interesting to observe the two different audiences – backup, and disaster recovery. But are they really so far apart? This is what I’ve been thinking when I saw a question posted by Mary – and felt that this is my opportunity to connect the two crowds, and perhaps explain how close they are.

Excellent question. There is a lot of confusion out there re. what is BC (business continuity), and what’s the relationship between backup, DR (disaster recofery), etc… Let me answer – we are the leading DR vendor, so we know “at least something” about it :-)

BC means assuring your business survives natural or man-made disasters, whether they cause loss of data, or loss of IT service (applications), or network connectivity issues. All three components are critical to your IT. In our world a true IT BC should cover all three aspects. And yes, there is a lot more in BC than IT, but the rest of it is outside of our scope.

Modern IT BC technology can assure that your IT service is never down (or can be brought back online very quickly). Definitely, data needs to be backed up, and how often you do it depends on your RPO (recovery point objective) requirement. How much data can you lose? It depends on your business – how critical the data is, how often it changes, and how much of it is produced. If you are a bank where thousands of ATM transactions are run every second – your RPO is probably very short so customers don’t lose their money.

Applications is different issue. If your data center is down you need to be able to quickly failover to DR provider’s data center and restart your applications ASAP. That’s what we call full server recovery. This will also mitigate networking issues, because in today’s modern software-defined data center, what you get from your DR provider is a logical representation of your entire data center “in the cloud”. So you get everything by accessing it remotely – virtual networks, applications, and data (assuming you backed it up with the same DR provider). Now, how fast your servers can fail-over to the cloud depends on your RTO (recovery time objective) – this is defined by whether your replicated environment is “cold” or “warm”, how automated the recovery process is (vs. all manual), and the support your are getting in real time from your DR provider. As they say, the devil is in the details, but with today’s technology you can get RTO in minutes if you need it.

This is a quick, 30,000 ft. view… Let me know if you’d like to dive deeper – always happy to help.