Nowadays, security breaches and data loss are becoming common in the IT industry. You have to protect all the company information and should also be readily available all the time for the business to thrive. Thus you cannot overlook the significance of the backup. Backing up all the valuable data is an integral part of the IT business strategy, but having a backup is not similar to IT disaster recovery planning. Thus, differentiating the backup from the disaster recovery might assist the companies in creating efficient strategies to avoid the consequences of the business disruptions and downtime.

Understanding the fundamental concept of disaster recovery and backup is crucial for decreasing the unplanned downtime impact on any organization. Downtime will result in revenue and sales reduction, disruptions in the possible supply chain, reputation loss due to unpopular publication, and interrupted services. Natural disasters, security breaches, ransomware, and human error might attack the IT resources availability. Any downtime might disrupt employee productivity, freeze all the organizational processes, customer data, and data destruction. Now it is time to know the primary differences between disaster recovery and backup solutions.

Comparison between Disaster Recovery solutions and backup solutions

If both the solutions are compared with each other, there are numerous differences between these two. They are as follows.

• Distinctive RPO and RTO

Setting up Recovery Point Objective or RTO and Recovery Time Objective or RPO is significant for any enterprise. Backup solutions include extensive RPO and RTO and are unsuitable for the business data that you need to rapidly restore after a threat. On the other hand, disaster recovery planning replicates the vital RMs to quickly perform the failovers if it is necessary. That means disaster recovery can accommodate much shorter RPOs and RTOs.

• Comprehensive Planning

The process of backup is uncomplicated. The organization needs to produce and attach to the RPOs as well as data retention requirements for a successful backup solution. With IT disaster recovery planning, the process becomes widely complicated. Besides the extra resources requirement, an organization needs to examine the business application significance and prioritize the VMs recovery order for operating such applications.

• Different Functions

A backup solution is the best when you include access to the damaged or lost object or file. It could be a PowerPoint presentation or an email. Through backups, companies implement data archival or data retention for the long term. However, if you are interested in quickly restoring the company’s performance after a threat or a disaster, you should go for a disaster recovery solution. With both disaster recovery site and solution in place, you can operate failover for transferring the workloads to the VMs replica present at the disaster recovery location. It will allow your company to perform as usual, even when the production site is unavailable.

• Allocation of the Resources

You have to store the backups in the compressed state and thus do not need much storage or allocation space. On the contrary, disaster recovery needs a separate site with completely operational IT infrastructure that should always remain ready for the possible failover each time.

• Both the processes are Necessities.

No company should neglect the benefits of both disaster recovery and backup solutions. If any company needs hours of valuable time to retain a lost data due to accidental deletion, employees, partners, or customers will not have any access to all the vital information. It will also prevent them from completing any critical business processes that are dependent on the technology. If you take days to retrieve the data and bring your business back online after a tragedy, then you might lose some potential business revenue and permanent customers. Given the amount of money and time you might lose in both the processes, investment in disaster recovery and backup solutions is worthy.