On the surface, data backups and disaster recovery can oftentimes be mistaken as the same thing due to both being viewed as insurance in the rare event of a disaster. Understanding what differentiates the two and implementing them properly into a resilience strategy allows your organization to protect both data integrity and business continuity. Today, we’re breaking down both to ensure teams have a clear understanding of where each falls under the resilience umbrella, and why both are needed for success.
Data Backups:
At their core, backups are point-in-time copies of data designed to protect against accidental deletion, corruption, or events such as an erase attack. They answer a simple question: If our data is lost, can we get it back? But while backups ensure you have a copy of your data, they don’t account for attacks such as malware and ransomware, how quickly systems will be restored, or whether applications will be usable after said recovery. In other words, backups preserve data integrity when they’re clean and safe to recover from, but if your primary account is compromised, your backups alone are not enough recover safely and keep your business running.
Disaster Recovery:
While backups ensure a copy of your data is kept, disaster recovery accounts for the plan and processes needed to recover entire systems and applications swiftly and predictably. Implementing a solid disaster recovery strategy requires the definition of an organization’s recovery point objective (RPO), meaning how much data can you afford to lose, and recovery time objective (RTO), meaning how long can you afford to be down. Ultimately, DR answers the harder question: How fast can the business recover and keep moving forward?
Why You Need Both:
Data backups and disaster recovery work best together because they protect different, but equally critical aspects of an organization. Backups ensure data can be restored after erasure or corruption, while disaster recovery ensures entire applications and systems can be brought back online in alignment with defined RTO and RPO parameters. Without backups, there’s nothing reliable to recover; without DR, restored data may sit idle while the business remains down. Together, they give organizations confidence that they can both recover their information and resume operations, minimizing downtime, financial impact, and risk when disruption or disaster strikes.
About Arpio:
As the only Disaster Recovery solution built for the cloud, Arpio was designed from the ground up to support the broad swath of services needed to run modern applications and keep your business up and running in the face of disaster or disruption. Arpio supports over 100 cloud native resources across dozens of services in both AWS and Azure, with support for new services being added regularly.
Want to learn more? Schedule a demo with Arpio today!
