What is disaster recovery?
Disaster Recovery involves making a continuous copy of the complete (virtual) environment, to a disaster recovery location. This fallback location is at a sufficient distance from the primary location and runs fully synchronously with it. If something happens and the primary environment is unreachable, the fallback environment can be started with one click of a button. This way, you can carry on working as normal and the continuity of your organisation is guaranteed.
What is the difference between disaster recovery and backup?
It is commonly thought that Disaster Recovery and backup are the same thing, however, nothing could be further from the truth. A backup is a copy of your data and files stored in another location. In the event of a disaster, these can be restored. Backups therefore involve the actual copying of files and data, taking a picture of the information as it was at that specific moment, so to speak. It comes in handy when, for example, a file was accidentally deleted and you want to restore the latest version. This therefore recovers part of the data. Unlike a backup, Disaster Recovery copies the entire environment. This includes not only data, but also all applications (servers), networks and security mechanisms. As a result, you can always pick up where you left off and not just have access to your data, as is the case in the backup scenario.
We can easily explain the difference using RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective).
RPO stands for the recovery point and therefore the amount of data that will be lost when recovery from the primary environment is required. In other words, with an RPO of two hours, you will lose two hours of your data in the worst-case scenario. The RPO with a daily backup is a maximum of 24 hours. This therefore allows you to lose 24 hours of data.
RTO stands for the time your organisation needs to be fully up and running again after a disaster. An RTO of two hours means that in the most extreme case, your organisation will be offline for two hours. Such RTO is often many times longer with a backup than it is with Disaster Recovery. The big difference therefore lies in the amount of data loss in a disaster scenario, but even more so in the recovery time: what good is the data in the event of a disaster if you don't have hardware to use that data with? Often, getting computing power available to launch all applications for such data is a bigger challenge. But also don't forget things like establishing new connections and securing them.
When is something important enough to secure it with disaster recovery?
This depends mainly on the amount of damage to your organisation when the service you provide is unavailable. Ask yourself the following question: what does it cost your organisation when the IT infrastructure is unavailable for an hour, a day or a week? This is often greatly underestimated. And do you also know how long it takes to make IT available again in the event of a complete outage? Very often, restoring a backup is the last straw and getting infrastructure available to restore data on is something that takes weeks rather than days.
For example, if you have a web shop selling winter sports goods, it is a lot more damaging if this web shop is offline in the autumn than if it happens, say, in June or July. So we mostly see applications that need to be online 24/7 with zero downtime being secured by Disaster Recovery in addition to backup.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) by Fundaments
Ensuring that a Disaster Recovery runs smoothly requires 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 achieve a Disaster Recovery solution in a multi Cloud environment.
Before choosing a solution, we always look at certain aspects, such as:
- Scenario: is it Cloud-to-Cloud or on premises-to-Cloud?
- Used technology for the Cloud platform: is it multi Cloud or a hybrid environment in use?
- What are the RPO and RTO? This may differ for each application.
Based on these criteria, it is easy to make the right call for the best-fit solution. In this regard, Fundaments can provide the right architecture to set up the disaster recovery solution. In addition, Fundaments provides the total roadmap to start the fallback: the sequence and automatic renumbering on IPs is also done within this. And last but not least, 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.
