Tag: disaster recovery

IT resilience
Disaster Recovery

IT Resilience vs. Disaster Recovery: Understanding the Difference

Written by Layer One Networks Published

If you’re like most leaders, you probably spend a lot of time thinking about disaster recovery and how to avoid it. After all, it’s the stuff of nightmares – a natural disaster or man-made catastrophe that knocks out your IT infrastructure, leaving your business in the lurch.

Disaster Recovery (DR) and IT Resilience are two different approaches to the same goal: keeping your organization running in the event of a disaster. While DR is more focused on recovering from a disaster, IT Resilience is about being prepared for one.

In this blog, we’ll look at each option and when you will need one over the other.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery Services

Disaster recovery is restoring computing systems and data to a functional state after a disaster such as fire, flood, or theft. Disaster recovery can also include business continuity planning and testing, ensuring that an organization can continue operations despite an outage.

The organization can recover from a disaster. Disaster recovery plans are designed to help organizations return to normal operations after a disaster. Organizations that have deployed cloud computing solutions may also refer to their DR plan as a BC/DR plan (business continuity/disaster recovery).

What is IT Resilience?

IT resilience is about ensuring that the IT infrastructure can withstand any kind of disruption and still be able to perform its mission-critical tasks. A resilient IT infrastructure can continue to operate in the event of any type of failure, whether it’s technical or natural.

IT resilience is an organization’s ability to maintain operations despite disruptions in the availability of IT services. This means continuing to provide basic services even when there are issues with one or more parts of the IT infrastructure. 

This could include having redundant components or systems in place so that when one component fails, another can take over seamlessly, having backups ready so that users can continue working if there is a disruption, or using load balancing techniques so that multiple servers work together as if they were one server.

What’s the Difference Between IT Resilience and Disaster Recovery?

IT Resilience and Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery is a Process That Activates After a Disaster has Occurred

The term “resilience” refers to the ability of an IT service (or application) to maintain its level of service in the face of an outage. This differs from disaster recovery — which is focused on restoring normal operations after a catastrophic event. In other words, resilience is about keeping things running as usual, while disaster recovery services focus on restoring normal operations after something goes wrong.

Disaster recovery is an emergency response plan for when your business experiences an unexpected catastrophe or disruption that could harm operations, such as an earthquake, flood, or hack. It’s different from IT resilience because it happens after a disaster has already occurred — not before.

IT Resilience is Preventative; Disaster Recovery is Reactive

IT resilience focuses on preventing problems before they happen. Disaster recovery focuses on reacting to problems after they occur.

IT resilience is about preventing disasters from occurring in the first place by making plans to protect against them before they occur. With IT resilience, you’re taking steps to avoid problems before they happen, so there are fewer issues when they do occur. For example, if there’s a potential risk of a data leak or a software virus getting embedded, you can install appropriate antivirus systems and conduct regular scans to prevent such an incident.

Disaster Recovery Helps Recover from Incidents

IT resilience helps your organization stay in control during an emergency by maintaining access to data, applications, and users even when disaster strikes. Disaster recovery helps ensure that you can recover quickly enough so that users can be back up and running as soon as possible after a disaster strikes.

On the other hand, IT resilience gives your organization the knowledge and tools to respond quickly if something goes wrong. And an IT consulting service can help you create a strategy to implement IT resilience by taking into account your previous incidents.

When Do You Need Disaster Recovery?

There are different types of events that trigger the need for recovery. 

A disaster may be a flood, hurricane, earthquake, or any other major event that damages critical infrastructure that affects your business continuity. A disruption could be something like a power outage, server failure, or even an attack on your systems. In most cases, you’ll have time to prepare for these types of events, but in some cases, they can take place without warning.

For example, if your data center suffers minor damage during a power outage but remains operational for most functions (e.g., email, file sharing), this would be considered an interruption rather than a full-blown incident requiring IT.

This is when you need disaster recovery services.

When Do You Need IT Resilience?

Achieving IT resilience requires systems, services, and processes that work together to protect your data and ensure availability. Let’s take a look at three common scenarios where you’ll need an IT resilience strategy and backup as a service:

  • You’re running a 24/7 operation where uptime is critical
  • You have key employees who work remotely from home or other offices, but they still need access to all their data and applications via VPNs or even the internet itself.
  • Your company’s cybersecurity model requires high-availability systems.

Do You Need Disaster Recovery Services or IT Resilience?

What many people don’t realize is that there are two distinct types of business continuity planning: disaster recovery and IT resilience. And while disaster recovery is essential for any organization with mission-critical systems, IT resilience can be just as important — especially if you want to survive in today’s competitive landscape.

Want to know more about how both of these can work well for your organization? Reach out to our IT consulting firm to discuss your recovery and resilience plans.

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Managed Backup Services
Disaster Recovery

How Managed Backup Solves an Important Challenge?

Written by Layer One Networks Published

You have a backup when your primary system fails. But what happens when there’s a problem with your backup?

Every company has some sensitive data or the other to store. Even when you have a strong data storage system in place, it’s crucial to have equally robust managed backup services in times when the worst happens. 

This backup is the last line of defense for every company that relies on data. But what happens when your backup system fails?

If you don’t want such an adverse incident to occur, then you’ve to reinforce your backup strategy in such a way that there aren’t any loopholes. In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the backup challenges and how you can handle them.

5 Data Backup Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Many IT consulting firms provide data backup solutions. But to make sure that you have a foolproof backup plan, you need to know all the ins and outs there’s to know about managed backup services.

Our experts at LayerOne Networks have provided Backup as a Service to many SMBs and large organizations. With their experience, we’re tapping into the backup challenges and the best ways to handle them.

  • 1. What to do when your backup gets corrupted?

Managed backups

Well, this is one scary nightmare for companies. When the backup gets corrupted, you can completely lose your entire data, especially if your primary storage has also let you down.

This generally happens due to multiple reasons: poor handling of the data, the backup has been outdated, the media stored on the backup is damaged and spoils the entire system or any other reason.

Solution: When such a thing happens, you can try to recover data and may be successful in partly recovering some data. But you may not know which data can be recovered. And sometimes, even the recovered files may not be enough to run applications. 

In such cases, you can make multiple copies of the critical data and store it on different sites. You can also use smart applications to ensure the transfer of secure data.

There’s another rare case where the backup gets damaged if it’s stored in an offsite location. It’s best to go for onsite backup solutions that are much safer than offsite backup storage.

  • 2. What to Do When the Backup Hasn’t Been Initiated?

This is a mistake many do when they’re new to the concept of backup. This usually happens when you decide to manually backup the data whenever you need. And sometimes, when you forget to do that, you can lose important information.

Solution: Every backup service provider offers automated scheduling of the backups. So make the most of it and schedule backup to run at regular intervals. This will easily solve this problem.

  • 3. What to Do When Your Backup is Incomplete?

So, your main storage fails for some reason. And when you open your backup, you realize that only a part of the files is stored. So, what’s the reason for incomplete backup?

This may happen when the system got interrupted as it was uploading to the backup storage and for some reason, failed to complete. It can be due to network issues, human negligence to approve the continuation of backup or any other system issue. 

Solution: To avoid such situations, enable options in your backup system to continue the transfer from the same point before the interruption. Also, when choosing the options for automatic backup, don’t be very selective and select all the necessary files you’ll need.

  • 4. What to Do When the Database Storage Capacity Becomes Larger?

This is one common struggle for SMBs when it comes to data backup. Backup services cost as much as space you consume and therefore, many cannot afford to back up every single one of their files. But what can we do when the backup limit is nearing and there’s a massive volume of important data that needs to be backed up?

Solution: This is when the help of managed backup solutions come in. When you outsource the backup services to an expert, the team will plan and manage your data on the backup storage efficiently. They’ll remove the data that’s outdated and backup the data that’s needed right now and help you to stay within your budget.

  • 5. How can you extend security to your backup storage too?

managed backup

Data security is on the minds of every single company that deals with sensitive information. While you’ll be using hi-tech security features for your master database, you need to extend the same level of security for your backup storage since both contain important data.

Solution: If you’re worried about hiring another team for the security of backup storage, here’s a better solution for you. You can outsource the backup security, maintenance and monitoring to an IT consulting firm that’ll have their own team to run constant checks on your backup storage just like your central storage. 

You can also combine the backup management services along with the maintenance and get an affordable deal.

If you’re looking for a good IT consulting firm offering managed backup services, then call us at 361.653.6800. Our backup and disaster recovery experts will guide you to choose the right backup strategy within your budget and stay protected.

Key Takeaways

While having a good backup system is the right thing to do, you should equally focus on maintaining this system as your main storage. Here are the top things to stay secure with your backup.

  • Make multiple backups of important data.
  • Schedule automated backing up of the data at regular intervals.
  • Enable options to ensure smooth, complete transfer of data even when interrupted.
  • Outsource to managed backup service providers to handle vast volumes of data backups at affordable rates.
  • Extend a high level of security to your backed up data with managed backup solutions.
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