Disaster Recovery means having the ability to restore systems to any given point in time where the systems were fully functional. A good Data Recovery strategy will provide an acceptable amount of data loss and functionality. Businesses create policies that determine specific requirements of the recovery process such as system priorities, maximum loss thresholds, and maximum time to be operationally ready.

Disaster Recovery will encompass business processes and technology. On the technology side, recovery can occur at the application level, system level or data level.

Restoration of applications can occur on server systems through local or virtual machines/infrastructures. Many applications also operate on guest devices by streaming through an application code on a centralized server or system. Some of these resources can include printers, drives or other resources that are connected to the network but made available to the guest device. In both cases, reinstatement of applications can occur individually or as a part of the whole system’s restoration.

Systems, including several server types, are restored through the utilization of backups taken before the outage occurs.

And data is essentially the information that your applications or systems access. Similar to systems, it is restored through a backup that was taken before the outage occurred.

Key Terms to Understand

RTO – Recovery Time Objective

RTO is the recovery time objective. This directly refers to the maximum length of time tolerable for an application, computer, network or system is allowed to be down after a disaster or failure takes place. In one example, if the TRO for an application is defined as 1 hour, having redundant backup data on an external hard drive would probably be the best solution.

RPO – Recovery Point Objective

RPO or recovery point objective is a major part of continuity planning within a business. It refers to a targeted period threshold in which data (transactions) can possibly be lost from an IT service due to a failure or disaster.

BCDR – Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery

Business continuity or disaster recovery plays a key role in limiting the effects of failures, outages or disasters have on business processes. This is a strategy that encompasses specific business relevant processes after a business impact analysis (BIA) and risk analysis is performed. It can also involve BC/DR plans, tests, exercises, and training.

Backup vs DRaaS – Backup vs Disaster Recovery As A Service

The difference between backup and disaster recovery is a key difference to understand. Backups are making one or more copies of data. 

Disaster Recovery is the direct strategy and steps taken to quickly recover from a failure and access the applications, data, and IT resources after that failure.