Backup’s Role in Diaster Recovery

The terms disaster recovery (DR) and backup are thrown around almost interchangeably these days.  While traditional backup and recovery technologies are certainly one way to satisfy the requirements of a disaster recovery plan, relying on only traditional back-up and recovery is a rather myopic view for IT administrators to take.

Backup is no longer just a safety repository, but instead has become a relied-upon method of recovering the broad in-house IT environment in the event of a failure.  As we enter a virtual world, the ability to encapsulate an entire workload (the OS, applications and data) into an independent set of files has allowed back-up technology to evolve and recovery times to improve, however the solutions are still lacking with regards to 24/7 availability and at the same time abandon the once impenetrable bastion of granular data protection and point-in-time recovery which traditional back-up once held. To truly address both the needs of application availability and point-in time recovery, businesses must ask questions around where backup and recovery fits as part of a larger disaster recovery strategy and whether or not back-up solutions rise to the challenge in practice of supporting the application environment during major and minor business interruptions.

For any business re-assessing backup plans, it is important to be mindful of the function that backup technology serves to the business with the addition of a full disaster recovery plan.  As part of a business continuity plan, true high availability and disaster recovery software to combine some flavor of real-time data protection along with application monitoring and failover capabilities to standby systems to provide continuous coverage of the datacenter’s critical systems.  Coupling backup technology with this kind of continuous availability solution generates a high resilience designed to satisfy financial and user-demand requirements.  It allows IT administrators to address the challenges of both major and minor ‘disasters’.