IT system failure or malfunction in your company due to an earthquake? Well, not really. And due to a power outage or ransomware encryption? More likely. Such a disaster is rarely courteous enough to announce in advance. That’s why it’s always better to play it safe in advance. If you ask how this works, you will hear terms such as disaster recovery, high availability, failover or backup – what are the differences?

Our article here is intended to help you understand and differentiate between the various terms. This will be useful if your company wants to play it safe. And to check that you are not being lulled into a false sense of security.

 

Disaster recovery

With disaster avoidance solutions, there are two mirrored systems, but in different physical locations (usually a safe distance apart). This provides an additional layer of security and uptime guarantee, as one system kicks in as soon as the other fails.

 

High availability

It usually consists of a replica of the operating system at the same location (or data center), which means that if the data center fails, both working copies also fail. Downtime is therefore unavoidable.

 

Failover

(German about: failure switchover) is a system for increasing reliability by switching between two or more systems. systems. It is generally a computer that is ready to run your business-critical programs. In the event of a system failure there is an underbrwork because the service has to restart. This will on a computer switchedswitchedt, that allows you to you to continue working until the original system can be repaired by the IT department. kcould.

 

Backup

A storage of copies of your data at a specific date and time, which can range from a few hours to a few days ago, depending on business practice. Often this data is written to physical tapes, which are inexpensive but take longer to access and restore large amounts of data.

 

 

Conclusion

Situation: You are editing your last vacation photos on your computer. Then it suddenly catches fire. Disaster recovery is a computer in a different location where you can simply continue working. High availability would be a computer in the same location that would probably also have caught fire. Failover would be a laptop that would support the most important programs. Until you had replaced the actual computer. Backup would be the way you stored the data before “the disaster” happened: cloud or physical tapes?

How can you use your newly acquired knowledge most effectively in your company? How can you check whether you really have a disaster recovery plan or “just” a backup? Simple: contact us here and we will be happy to help.