What is disaster recovery?
Disaster Recovery involves creating a continuous copy of your entire (virtual) environment to a failover location. This failover site is located at a sufficient distance from the primary site and runs completely in sync with it. If something happens and the primary environment becomes unreachable, the failover environment can be started with the click of a button. This allows you to keep working and ensures your organization's continuity.
What is the difference between disaster recovery and backup?
People often think Disaster Recovery and backup are the same, but nothing could be further from the truth. A backup is a copy of your data and files stored in a different location. In the event of a disaster, these can be restored. With backups, files and data are actually copied, creating a snapshot of the information as it existed at that specific moment. This is useful if, for example, a file was accidentally deleted and you want to restore the latest version. It retrieves a portion of the data. Unlike a backup, Disaster Recovery copies the entire environment. This includes not just data, but all applications (servers), networks, and security mechanisms. This allows you to pick up exactly where you left off, rather than just having access to your data as in a backup scenario.
We can easily explain the difference using RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective).
RPO stands for the recovery point, representing the amount of data lost when you have to fall back on restoring the primary environment. In other words: with an RPO of two hours, in the worst-case scenario, you lose two hours of data. The RPO for a daily backup is a maximum of 24 hours, meaning you could lose up to 24 hours of data.
RTO stands for the time your organization needs to be fully up and running again after a disaster. An RTO of two hours means that in the most extreme case, your organization is offline for two hours. Such an RTO is often many times longer for a backup than for Disaster Recovery. The big difference lies in the amount of data loss during a disaster scenario, but even more so in the recovery time: what good is data in a disaster if you don't have the hardware to use it? Often, getting the computing power to start all applications for that data is a bigger challenge. And don't forget things like establishing new connections and securing them.
When is something important enough to protect with disaster recovery?
This mainly depends on the damage to your organization if the service you provide is unavailable. Ask yourself: what does it cost your organization if the IT infrastructure is unavailable for an hour, a day, or a week? This is often vastly underestimated. And do you know how long it takes to make IT available again in the event of a total outage? Often, a restore from a backup is the last resort, and getting the infrastructure ready to restore that data to is something that takes weeks rather than days.
For example, if you have a webshop selling winter sports gear, it is much more damaging if this shop is offline in the autumn than if it happens in June or July. We see that applications that must be online 24/7 with zero downtime are protected by Disaster Recovery in addition to backup.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) from Fundaments
To ensure Disaster Recovery goes smoothly, you need the right tools and people. We provide this through our Cloud Experts and software from Zerto and VMware. Using Cloud Director Availability, we can easily implement a Disaster Recovery solution in a Multi-Cloud environment.
Before choosing a solution, we always look at specific aspects, such as:
- Scenario: is it Cloud-to-Cloud or on-premises-to-Cloud?
- Technology used for the Cloud platform: is a Multi-Cloud or Hybrid environment being used?
- What are the RPO and RTO? These can vary per application.
Based on these criteria, it is easy to select the most suitable solution. Fundaments can provide the right architecture to set up the failover solution. Additionally, Fundaments handles the entire playbook for initiating the failover: the sequence and automatic IP renumbering are included. And importantly, these can also be tested without impacting the primary environment.
Our Cloud Experts are happy to think along with you and show you the possibilities.
