Sysfore Technologies

#117-120, First Floor, 4th Block, 80 Feet Road, Koramangala, Bangalore 560034

CLOUD BACKUP OR CLOUD

DISASTER RECOVERY: WHAT’S

THE DIFFERENCE?

Cloud Backup or Disaster Recovery – What’s the difference?

Cloud Data Backup is not Cloud Disaster Recovery. One particular

misunderstanding among the customers is about cloud backup, storage and

disaster recovery. It’s mainly due to the misrepresentation by the cloud vendors,

and lack of background information on their part.

Many organizations are considering cloud backup because it eliminates tape-

based backup technology, automates backups, removes the human capital

component and other services like off-site tape storage fees.

Get your facts clear about Cloud Backup, Cloud Storage and Disaster Recovery

with a free consultation with Sysfore cloud experts.

Before discussing about the difference, let us first understand what Cloud

Storage, Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery mean:

Cloud Storage: Saving your content and information to your or Cloud-based

servers.

Cloud Backup: Having a second copy of the information and content you have

stored. The content may be kept for days, weeks, months, or years depending

on the requirements of your business.

Disaster Recovery: The ability to restore your content in the event of a major

disruption to your company’s ability to work so that you can return to business.

In the beginning stages of disaster recovery planning, decision makers are often

mistaken about what constitutes a disaster recovery plan. Many times they are

misled by the idea that data backup is sufficient precaution in the event of a

disaster.

While having a backup strategy is important, it is not the same as a disaster

recovery strategy; rather, the beginning stages of establishing a proper DR plan.

A backup is a copy of your data; a disaster recovery plan is insurance that

guarantees its recovery.

However, there is a misconception that cloud backups can improve an

organization’s recovery time simply because it is a disk-based backup. In reality,

it may take you longer than tape to restore.

There are three easy questions to ask to determine if a cloud backup service can

work as part of your disaster recovery strategy:

Can you get your data from where it is in the cloud to where it needs to

be for restoration and recovery and still meet your recovery time

objective (RTO) requirements?

Can you perform your disaster recovery using additional cloud services

from the same provider thus the data is where it needs to be for

restoration and recovery of your critical systems in the cloud?

Can you regularly test either of these two scenarios (or both) as a part of

your contract before locking in a long-term contract with the cloud

backup provider you are considering.

So, what makes backups and disaster recovery different?

Data retention requirements: Backups are typically performed on a daily basis

to ensure necessary data retention at a single location, for the single purpose of

copying data.

Disaster recovery requires the determination of the RTO (recovery time

objective) in order to designate the maximum amount of time the business can

be without IT systems post-disaster. Traditionally, the ability to meet a given

RTO requires at least one duplicate of the IT infrastructure in a secondary

location to allow for replication between the production and DR site.

Recovery ability: Disaster recovery is the process of failing over your primary

environment to an alternate environment that is capable of sustaining your

business continuity.

Backups are useful for immediate access in the event of the need to restore a

document. It does not facilitate the failover of your total environment should

your infrastructure become compromised. They also do not include the physical

resources required to bring them online.

Additional resource needs: A backup is simply a copy of data intended to be

restored to the original source.

DR requires a separate production environment where the data can live. All

aspects of the current environment should be considered, including physical

resources, software, connectivity and security.

Planning process: Planning a backup routine is relatively simple, since typically

the only goals are to meet the RPO (recovery point objective) and data retention

requirements.

A complete disaster recovery strategy requires additional planning, including

determining which systems are considered mission critical, creating a recovery

order and communication process, and most importantly, a way to perform a

valid test.

The overall benefits and importance of a DR plan are to mitigate risk and

downtime, maintain compliance and avoid outages. Backups serve a simpler

purpose. Make sure you know which solution makes sense for your business

needs.

Sysfore can clear your misconceptions about Cloud Data Backup and Cloud

Disaster Recovery. Get in touch through info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-

4110-5555.