Backup plans and disaster recovery plans are two terms that often seem to be used interchangeably in the IT space. But these are two entirely different parts of your company’s infrastructure, and it is critical that you know the difference and have both types of plans in place to ensure business continuity.
A backup plan is essentially a plan to make sure your important data, files, applications, and critical business information is backed up and ready to restore in case of a catastrophic event, such as data loss due to hardware failure or a cybersecurity attack. There are a variety of different ways to backup your data, and 49% of businesses employ multiple options to backup their data.
As you may recall, we’ve discussed some of these backup options in our posts on the 3-2-1 backup rule. For most businesses, it is critical to utilize multiple backup options to ensure that there is always a copy of your company’s data available when you need it. Additionally, businesses no longer need to rely solely on the traditional backup options which require physical hardware and expensive server rooms.
This backup schedule is based on two important factors: your RPO, or recovery point objectives, and your RTO, or recovery time objectives. Your RPO states how often your backups need to be performed, and how recent your data needs to be if you have to restore it. For example, some businesses might only need to backup their data once a week, or once a day, because they know that they don’t necessarily need to restore every single thing up to the most current second. For other businesses, backups are performed multiple times per day (or even per hour) so it is essential that they have the most recent data to restore in order to maintain business continuity. For example, banks and other financial institutions will need to have much more recent backups that they can restore due to the frequent nature of customer transactions. Basically, when determining your RPO, you need to determine how much data you’d be willing to lose between your last successful backup and a failure. The more essential it is that you have up-to-the-minute data, the more frequent your RPO should be.
Your RTO is the amount of time a business is willing to be down without their data available until a restoration can be completed. It states what data needs to be backed up so that you know your critical files and applications can be restored if needed. This can include customer data and other critical and sensitive information that you can’t risk losing. For some, the RTO can include every aspect of your IT infrastructure, which includes not just your sensitive data and information, but your software, application files, and everything else you use in your business operations. In the event of a failure, your RTO will determine how much downtime your business will incur during the restoration and recovery processes. In some cases, this might just mean a restore, in the event of data loss. In the event of hardware failure, you need to factor in the time to purchase and receive new hardware, get it setup, and then start to restore the data. This can lead to a recovery time of days, maybe weeks, before your business is back to full functionality.
As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to creating and maintaining data backups for your business. At this point, you might be feeling pretty confident that your backup plan is comprehensive enough to help you recover from whatever disaster might befall your business. But that’s where the key difference between a backup plan and a disaster recovery plan come in. You could have several copies of your data backup, but do you know where and how you’re going to restore that data? Having your data backups won’t be much use if your actual IT environment is damaged by fire or flood or an asteroid attack. How do you get that data back onto your company’s computers and get your employees back to work? This is where having a separate and comprehensive disaster recovery plan comes into place.
A disaster recovery plan encompasses your backup plan and helps you develop a comprehensive playbook for how your business will maintain continuity in the event of a worst-case scenario. If, for example, your office is hit by that previously mentioned asteroid, you could find yourself with a full backup of your company’s data and nowhere to restore it to. Your disaster recovery plan isn’t just about having a solid process for backing up and securing your essential data. It also involves proactive measures to avoid a disaster altogether, as well as a concrete list of protocols covering who is responsible for responding to the different aspects of a disaster.
When disaster strikes, people tend to panic and the last thing you want is to have the critical members of your team unsure of what they’re supposed to do to get your business back up and running. In our next post, we’ll be discussing the elements of a disaster recovery plan in more detail, so you know exactly what to include and how to test your plan so you’re ready if that asteroid ever comes.
If you still aren’t sure if you need a full disaster recovery plan, remember this: 90% of businesses without a disaster recovery plan fail in the event of a disaster. Don’t just assume that you’re prepared because if you find out you’re not, it might be too late to do anything about it. To make sure your business is ready to face any disasters that might come, contact the experts at TAG Solutions today and see how we can help your business become ready and resilient.