Data Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR)

The Value of Planning

What creates more havoc than uncertainty?

Natural disasters, pandemics, accidents, and/or man-made disasters all are beyond our control. As a business owner, what is under your control is your organization’s ability to survive any of those occurrences.

While having a backup of your company’s data is important, it doesn’t guarantee recovery. The best time to plan for a disaster is before one happens.

Data Retention Requirements

Data backups, for the most part, are scheduled to occur daily, with the sole purpose of copying data. Disaster recovery is far more extensive and goes more in-depth with regard to data retention requirements. The keywords to understand for disaster recovery data retention are Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). A disaster recovery plan requires that you determine these two objectives to evaluate your needs post-disaster. An RTO is the period for which your business can continue to function manually while the systems are restored. Obviously, this varies from business to business, and can range from 10 minutes to a few days. An RPO refers to the amount of data that your organization is okay with losing due to a disaster. These two factors are completely dependent and will vary based on the size and type of business.

Recovery Ability

Backups are great for immediate retrieval in the event there is a need to restore a document – not necessarily your business’ entire environment. The disaster recovery process ensures that, should your infrastructure become compromised, your primary environment will failover to an alternate environment. This is an automatic protection action to an alternate environment that sustains your business and keeps you running.

Additional Resources

Backups exist as a simple copy of data with the intention of restoring into the original source. Disaster recovery data exists within a separate environment, and therefore needs its own support resources, such as physical resources, software, connectivity, and security.

Planning

Planning for backups is an established standard operating procedure (SOP), i.e., routine, with the only goal generally being to meet data retention requirements. Disaster recovery planning is far more intensive and requires prioritizing critical functions within your operations and putting strategies in place to ensure there is little to no downtime for your business operations.

Additional Peace of Mind

Keeping your organization running smoothly and securely is paramount in today’s economy. In addition to putting a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan in place, consider implementing managed services.

Managed services can provide the total solution to keeping your business at its best. It allows you to focus on your business, without the daily concerns of technology management. When downtime is not an option, managed services makes sense. LightWork® Managed Services is a leading provider of managed IT services for small to mid-sized businesses. To learn how you can save time, energy, and resources with LightWork Managed Services click here.