Data Recovery Is an Important Part of the Backup Process

How does your business manage its data backups? How about restoring them in the event of a disaster scenario? These are questions that no business wants to have no answer to on the spot. You want to have both data backup and disaster recovery put into place to avoid losing a considerable amount of progress.

It can be difficult to see how data backup and disaster recovery are two different things, but the fact remains that they fulfill a very important role for business continuity. Data backup is the process of actually taking the data backup that you will then later restore to a workable state. Disaster recovery is when you restore a working data backup so that it can be used to get your organization into a state where it can operate following a data loss incident.

A business continuity solution needs to include both data backup and disaster recovery, both of which should be used to achieve an ideal recovery point objective and recovery time objective. Here are what they are:

Recovery point objective: The recovery point objective, or RPO, is how much data needs to be restored in the event of a disaster. Basically, the more data that you need to restore to get your operation going again, the larger your RPO is going to be.

Recovery time objective: The recovery time objective is the amount of time your organization has to restore data before your business is in trouble. Every moment wasted waiting for your data to be restored is costly, but there reaches a point where if you don’t have your data, you can’t sustain operations, and the business begins to fail.

Not all data backup and disaster recovery systems are the same. In some cases, they are just inferior to others. Take tape backup as an example. While it may have been the standard solution for quite some time, it’s an inconvenient manner of taking data backups and restoring them. Not only is it time-consuming, but it’s also not automatic and prone to user error. You could potentially lose up to an entire day’s worth of data in the event of a disaster scenario. Network-attached data backup and disaster recovery with cloud functionality is better, as it allows for fast data recovery and for multiple backups to be taken every single hour. In fact, you can take backups as often as every fifteen minutes, making it much better than the singular large data backup that can only be taken once. This helps to minimize downtime and data loss in the event of a disaster.

Does your business need a better way to approach data backup? k_Street Consulting, LLC can help. To learn more, reach out to us at (202) 640-2737.