Data loss and security breaches are now everyday events. It’s not a matter of ‘what if’ a disaster will take place, only a matter of ‘when.’ The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner reported more than 1,100 data breaches in 2024, the highest number ever reported. This number is expected to be higher in the upcoming years.
It’s no exaggeration to say that data is one of the most valuable assets for any organisation. Within your files and records lies critical customer information that’s both highly valuable and, once lost, often impossible to recover. Plus, your data volume only keeps growing, at a faster rate with each passing day. That’s why, for the proper functioning of your business, all information — across every device — must be protected and available at all times.
Whatever the size of your business, minimising potential damage means having backup and disaster recovery plans, policies, and strategies in place to keep data safe and ensure business continuity. This blog explains what backups and disaster recovery are and how they differ.
Backup and Disaster Recovery (BUDR/BDR)
Data backup is a basic part of an IT strategy for any organisation. Accidents (human error or software and server issues) and cyber attacks happen. Unplanned interruptions can quickly escalate, resulting in lost sales, reputational damage, and disrupted service.
Backing up your data — whether you use external backup or cloud storage — and having cybersecurity in place, is essential for your business. A disaster recovery plan is also needed to avoid costly business interruptions.
So what’s the difference between backup and disaster recovery, and why is it important.
What’s the difference between backup and disaster recovery?
Understanding what is backup disaster recovery, the basics of backup vs disaster recovery, and how they complement each other, is fundamental to maintaining business continuity and resilience in your organisation.
What is Data Backup and Recovery?
A data backup means creating copies of your files and applications so you can restore them after a data loss event. Data backup and disaster recovery services are the foundation of any data protection and recovery strategy.
What is Disaster Recovery?
The NIST definition of disaster recovery refers to how long it takes to restore your data “in the event of a major hardware or software failure or destruction of facilities.”
There are many backup disaster recovery solutions available — such as VMware, Veeam, AWS, Terraform, and Azure — which work by replicating systems to the cloud.
To fully understand their differences — and what they mean for your business success — let’s look at the broader context: backup vs disaster recovery, disaster recovery vs resilience, and disaster recovery vs contingency planning. How do they all connect to your business?
A contingency plan focuses on keeping your organisation running. Cyber resilience is about building a structure that can withstand and minimise damage during an unplanned event. Meanwhile, data backup and disaster recovery protect your business in different but complementary ways. Data backup protects your files by duplicating them to other locations, while a disaster recovery plan focuses on restoring operations to normal after a disaster.
Resilient organisations continually work to adapt to changes and risks that can affect their ability to continue critical functions. A disaster recovery plan (DRP) and a business continuity plan (BCP) are just two of the contingency plans that make a business resilient.
The difference between DRP and BCP is that a BCP keeps the business running after a disaster, and a DRP restores normal business operations after the disaster.
What’s the basis of Disaster Recovery (DR)?
When talking about disaster recovery, there are two essential parameters to keep in mind:
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much data can your business afford to lose? This depends on your backup frequency.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How long can your organisation operate if the data centre is compromised? In other words, what’s your acceptable downtime?
What is disaster recovery testing, and why is it important?
When disaster strikes, you want to ensure that your business is back to normal within the allocated tolerance level. According to data by Datto and FEMA, large enterprises are set back $11,600 per minute of downtime, with small businesses paying around $133 per minute. Disaster recovery testing involves simulating a disaster to assess if the disaster recovery methods work as planned.
A best-practice disaster recovery plan testing checklist includes:
- RPO and RTO
- Hardware and software assessment
- Personnel duties
- Disaster recovery sites
- Identifying essential data
- Creating crisis and response processes
- Continuous testing
What is a good backup policy?
We’ve already seen the benefits of data backup and disaster recovery solutions, but what are the best practices?
In the past, external hard drives were great, but we’ve come to realise how fragile and prone to damage they are. Most people know about Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive, which are examples of cloud storage.
The data backup rule of three (3-2-1) is a simple way to create an effective backup and data recovery policy:
- Keep three copies of your data: this increases the disaster recovery time rate
- Keep two copies locally, but on different media: external hard drives, storage drives, cloud environments
- Keep one copy off-site: data centres, cloud environments
Do you have a backup and disaster recovery plan for databases in your organisation?
By now, you can see why backup and recovery protection is vital for every business — and why you need both. Not every business can afford continuous real-time backups and comprehensive disaster recovery sites. However, every business is different, and as your managed service provider, MSP Blueshift can deliver a personalised, robust backup disaster recovery solution to keep your company protected and running efficiently.
At MSP Blueshift, we specialise in data backup, data protection, and disaster recovery services designed for Australian businesses. Contact us and discover how our backup disaster recovery as a service can safeguard your operations.
