Is your company ready for a catastrophic event? In this article, we’ll help you make sure your organization is properly prepared by analyzing enterprise backup and cloud disaster recovery practices.
What Is Enterprise Backup?
While these two concepts are interconnected, let’s begin with the first to help you better understand the second. Enterprise backup refers to software that transfers data from your company’s main storage device to a secondary device.
Of course, this is nothing new. However, in the past, that secondary device would be something like a tape drive. Nowadays, it’s far more likely that the chosen device would be a disk device made specifically for this purpose.
More and more, though, the need for backing up data on an enterprise level has brought companies to data centers. As a result, we now have backup software that does more than just copy data; it’s become highly sophisticated to the point that this software can be relied upon for actually protecting the data it’s entrusted with, as well.
Today, you can find all kinds of platforms that even protect entire operating systems and environments. These enterprise backup solutions make full use of the data centers they’re contained inside.
They can even offer a wide range of auxiliary services like replication of data and rapid recovery, which leads us to our next point.
What Is Cloud Disaster Recovery?
What would be the worst case scenario for your company? If you really think about it, it would probably involve some version of your organization’s entire store of data being wiped completely clean, right?
If something like that happened, you’d have to start at ground zero. Getting back to normal operations could take months or even longer.
Even if your data wasn’t totally erased, you can imagine how difficult things would be for your organization if it was even compromised in the slightest or made inaccessible for as little as a few days.
These are the types of situations that are addressed in what we call “disaster recovery.” Rather than some all-encompassing set of standards, disaster recovery is a term that entails the specific steps your company must take to protect it against the types of catastrophic scenarios that could make your essential business operations impossible.
One of the most important ways to do this is through your cloud hosting platform. You can use this to back up all the data your company needs. Enterprise backup makes it possible to do this no matter how large your organization is or how long it’s been in business.
Replication, Rapid Recovery and Preparing for Catastrophic Events
Earlier we brought up replication. That simply means making copies of your company’s digital infrastructure so if you suffer a massive disaster that affects the original, you can switch it out for the other and move on.
Rapid recovery is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It allows for the rapid recovery of your digital assets through operations that are as simple as point-and-click. Obviously, a protocol as simple as this isn’t always going to work, but it’s a helpful asset to have for low-level problems.
While much of what we’ve talked about so far has revolved around digital methods for surviving a disaster, it’s also important to think about things like floods, earthquakes, and tornados that could destroy your data stores without a single line of code.
This is why disaster recovery practices must involve the cloud: so your data can be kept in separate locations in case a physical force strikes one of them.
Now that you better understand enterprise backup, cloud disaster recovery and how they relate, you should feel better prepared to plan for your company’s worst-case scenario.