The difference between cloud backup and cloud disaster recovery – and what it means for you

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(Image: IDGNS)

13 January 2016

Cloud backup has been around long enough that today the concept is well understood: a vendor backs up your data and stores it across a network of offsite servers, ideally at multiple locations for redundancy.

But what is “disaster recovery” – specifically cloud disaster recovery – and how is it different from cloud backup?

Cloud disaster recovery is a more comprehensive method of data protection than cloud backup. The distinctions center on the circumstances under which a business’s lost data can be restored by the vendor – and how long recovery will take.

Cloud backup: The factors affecting data recovery times

With cloud backup, if a business’s backed-up data is compromised, it can be restored on-demand to that business’s onsite servers. But this process is not automatic or immediate, and it can depend on such factors as:

The amount of data to be restored
The availability of the backup vendor’s support staff at the time of the data loss
The availability of hardware at the customer’s site where the data can be restored

This means that, were you to lose just one file, you might be able to recover it in minutes – assuming you contacted your backup vendor to report the loss, and that the company had support staff available. But recovering an entire server image? That could take days or weeks.

Cloud disaster recovery: A more advanced data protection solution

Cloud DR follows a similar process to cloud backup for maintaining backed-up data offsite. But cloud DR also includes failover live servers to an alternate environment – meaning that you could recover data in minutes or hours, and access it from a live virtual environment, regardless of how much data you lost.

You can learn more about cloud backup and disaster recovery at a free Lunch n’ Learn event on Monday, 25 January 2016 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Santry, Dublin. Click here to sign up.