It’s easy to confuse backups and disaster recovery. The easy way to clear this up is to say that backups are just part of a disaster recovery plan. Backups are the simple copying of important data to a safe location. For many small businesses, this step is enough to protect their business from IT mishaps. However, when a business grows, and their IT infrastructure becomes more complex, simply having access to that data may not be enough to recover from a true disaster scenario.

Consider the following example:

A business that manufactures car parts may collect data about their factory floor, production processes, customer lists, sales data, and management information. All this data is collected from various devices around their factory and aggregated onto a central server which is then backed up to an offsite location.

One day, a power surge causes the main server to fail. All their data is available from the offsite location and can be downloaded which is good news. However, the task of acquiring replacement server hardware, rebuilding the server configuration, restoring the links from each of the user devices to the new server and configuring the factory machines to use it, and then uploading data from the backup to the server could take weeks, or even months to complete. In that time, the manufacturer’s production cannot run, client work is brought to a halt, and cash flow essentially ceases.

Despite having access to all of their data, the loss of the server could nonetheless still result in the failure of the business.

In the above scenario, a disaster recovery plan would go beyond just having the data safely backed up. It would include a carefully designed and structured plan to recover the IT infrastructure from scratch if need be, including identifying hard to find parts and potentially keeping spares on hand. Having full disaster recovery plan means that recovery from a disaster can take days or hours, rather than weeks or months.

Whether or not you need disaster recovery planning over and above backups is a commercial decision that each business must make in light of their needs, costs associated with downtime, complexity of their IT infrastructure, and of course, their budget. Accel IT can help you weigh up all of these considerations.