Backup vs. Disaster Recovery: Why Both are Essential in 2023

For most people, a backup is the go-to restoration point for their computer when disaster strikes. However, for an organisation, there is a limit to how much backups can help post-catastrophe. 

The process of disaster recovery within organisations is a fully mapped out process that aims to get your organisation up and running as quickly as possible. Both backup and disaster recovery are vital processes that ensure whatever goes wrong, you can get up and running as quickly as possible. 

In this article, we are going to go over the ins and outs of backups and disaster recovery, and why both are essential for any business in 2023. 

What is a Backup? 

Backing up your data is the process of duplicating your data and storing it elsewhere as a restoration point in the event of system failure or catastrophe.  

The data from a backup must be easily and swiftly accessible to ensure easy recovery to mitigate downtime from system or infrastructure failure. This can be done in many forms — external drive storage, cloud backups, remote data centres, and storage arrays and partitions are just some of the different ways to ensure your data is backed up. 

Backing up is a process that works better on an individual level than an infrastructural level. Duplicating your entire system infrastructure is a massive undertaking that will consume a mass of resources, so is not suitable for most organisations.  

However, for individual employee devices and file systems, backups are a vital way of ensuring that everyone is covered in case of disaster.  

Backup Best Practices 

There are multiple practices that you should employ when implementing backups throughout your organisation. 

Follow the 3-2-1 rule: The 3-2-1 rule is a rule that helps ensure that you have multiple backups. To do so, you should make three unique backups on two different devices, one of which should be stored off-site. 

Encrypt Backup Data: Encrypting your backup data will ensure that your organisation is secure and protected from malicious hackers trying to access your data through your backups. 

Backup Frequently: By failing to back up your data regularly, you increase the amount of time since your last restoration point — meaning that you will end up losing more data overall.  

Test Your Backups: Ensuring that your backups work is important, as otherwise, they are essentially useless. This is why testing your backup is vital. 

What is Disaster Recovery? 

Disaster recovery is a more complex process to ensure that there is a plan to protect your data and services against unexpected issues and restore them in the event of a catastrophe. Backups are a part of this, but a lot more goes into a disaster recovery system. 

Disaster recovery aims to get all aspects of your organisation up and running swiftly and effectively, to ensure as little disruption and downtime as possible in the case of disaster. This means that there is far more to consider regarding recovery strategy. 

Disaster Recovery Best Practices 

There are a lot of different things to consider when creating your disaster recovery plan. Here are a few of the best practices that are vital to ensuring that you lay the best foundation for your disaster recovery strategy: 

Strategise and plan: Creating a detailed plan that is backed with expert knowledge is key to ensuring that your disaster recovery strategy works for your organisation. 

Create stakeholders for key responsibilities: These responsibilities usually include IT Experts, Department heads, Senior Management, Human Resources, and Public Relations. 

Analyse your business: Business impact analysis (BIA) is the process of breaking down your organisation into individual assets and services. Planning for each one of these assets and services will ensure that there is a plan of action for whatever has gone wrong. 

Determine your planning metrics: Calculating your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) will help set expectations and plan contingencies for any downtime. 

Test your plan: Testing is essential to ensure your plan functions as required. Making sure that your plan works seamlessly can be the difference between disaster and success. 

Why Both Backup and Disaster Recovery Are Essential 

Both backups and disaster recovery are crucial for any modern organisation. Backups are great for any individual within your organisation as this process ensures their data is securely recoverable should certain files become inaccessible. This accounts for device damage, data corruption, or anything else that disrupts the accessibility of any given individual’s data within your organisation. Restoring a single user’s data from a backup is quick and simple and is regularly actioned by administrators worldwide. 

Disaster recovery applies more so throughout your organisation, ensuring that there is a plan in place for any system-wide failure or any disaster that could result in massive disruption or downtime throughout your organisation. Because of this, disaster recovery is vital — and backups are one of the components of disaster recovery. 

Essentially, there is no single one that works. Disaster recovery and backups apply to various aspects of your organisation, and so ensuring that your organisation has both can be key to ensuring that your organisation is protected. 

Secure Your Organisation’s Disaster Recovery Today 

With effective backups and disaster recovery plans, your organisation will be prepared to battle anything. If you are looking to get started in working out your organisation’s best steps forward for disaster recovery, reach out to us today. Extech Cloud offers businesses in Burgess Hill, Haywards Heath, East Grinstead, Brighton and anywhere across Sussex or Surrey, the expertise required to ensure that your disaster recovery strategy is effective and works for your organisation’s needs. Contact the Extech Cloud team today to find out more and speak with a specialist.