| Backups vs. Disaster Recovery: Understanding the Essence for Business |
| Backups vs. Disaster Recovery: Understanding the Essence for Business |
For any business, data is a precious asset. Protecting this data from potential risks and losses is paramount, and two critical strategies are backups and disaster recovery. While they may seem similar, these strategies serve distinct purposes and play crucial roles in maintaining business continuity.
What are Backups?
Backups are copies of your data stored in a separate location, which can be used to restore lost data. These can include anything from business documents and databases to software. Businesses use backups as a safeguard against data loss from various threats such as accidental deletion, software corruption, or hardware failure.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery is a broader strategy that involves restoring not only data, but also the IT infrastructure after a major disruptive event like a natural disaster, a cyberattack, or even a power outage. A comprehensive disaster recovery plan includes processes, policies, and tools to restore normalcy quickly and efficiently.
How are Backups and Disaster Recovery Similar?
Both backups and disaster recovery aim to safeguard a business from the potential loss of data. They are critical elements of a larger business continuity plan that ensures minimal disruption to business operations in the face of data loss.
Backups vs. Disaster Recovery: How are They Different?
While backups focus on creating and storing copies of data, disaster recovery is about restoring operations following a disaster. Backups are usually performed daily or multiple times a day and involve moving data offsite. In contrast, disaster recovery involves a complete plan that includes steps to recover infrastructure, systems, and data after a catastrophic event.
Benefits of Backups
The primary benefit of backups is the ability to recover lost data quickly. With a robust backup strategy, a business can minimize the impact of data loss, maintaining operational efficiency and protecting critical information.
Zimcom’s Cloud Backup Solution: Veeam Cloud Connect
Veeam Cloud Connect simplifies the process of storing your backups in a hosted backup repository, referred to as a cloud repository, eliminating the need for expensive and complex second site management. Here’s what our clients can expect from our cloud backup solution:
Seamless Integration
With Veeam Cloud Connect, you can effortlessly use your cloud repository as if it were a local backup repository. Simply access the Veeam backup console and designate your cloud repository as the target for any backup or backup copy task. No extra downloads or Veeam licensing is necessary! Cloud Connect is included with all paid versions of Veeam Availability Suite, Veeam Backup & Replication, and Veeam Backup Essentials, v8 and later.
Efficiency
Veeam Cloud Connect optimizes your backup process by leveraging forever-incremental backups, in-cloud synthetic fulls, Built-in WAN Acceleration (in the Enterprise Plus edition), and more. This ensures minimal data transfer while maximizing restore points. Secure offsite backup storage becomes faster and easier without requiring additional bandwidth.
Security
Veeam Cloud Connect ensures the security of your data at all stages – at source, in transit, and at rest – without compromising data transfer speeds to the cloud, thanks to content-aware compression and WAN Acceleration. The multi-tenant capabilities of Cloud Connect also guarantee the same level of safety and confidentiality for your data as a dedicated offsite repository.
Questions about cloud backup solutions? Reach out to us today!
Benefits of Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery goes beyond data protection. It ensures business continuity in the face of significant disruptions, minimizing downtime and maintaining customer trust. A solid disaster recovery solution also helps businesses comply with industry regulations and standards.
Zimcom’s Disaster Recovery Solution is an Insurance Policy for Your Business
In the event of an outage, our cloud-based disaster recovery solution can effectively switch your server to the cloud within just 5 minutes. This swift response ensures your data and workloads are replicated, thereby shielding mission-critical systems against any primary system failure.
- Experience swift 5-Minute failover to the cloud
- Benefit from a fast and hassle-free setup with remote deployment within one hour
- Achieve rapid recovery for both Windows and Linux workloads
- Applicable across Bare Metal, Hyper-V, VMWare, KVM, Xen, and beyond
- Effortlessly harmonizes with Zimcom’s cloud platform
Your data is extra protected with Zimcom
Our disaster recovery solution usually includes replicating customer data so that we have a more recent copy of their data than the backup from last night. By using data replication with our disaster recovery solution, we lower the customer’s recovery point objective (RPO) by allowing us to failover using a copy of replicated data.
For example — we could have critical servers replicating to our cloud every hour, but they may only backup to us once per night. The backups are good for restoring deleted files or going back to a previous version of a software application. In the event of a disaster at the primary location, though, we’d likely use the disaster recovery replication job to failover to the cloud and use the most recent copy of their data prior to the disaster event.
Ready to leave your data in the best hands? Schedule a discovery call with us.
Why Businesses in the Midwest and Beyond Parnter with Zimcom for Disaster Recovery Services
Predictable Monthly Expenses
With us, there are no surprise bills or binding contracts – only stable monthly costs that enable effective budget management.
Robust Security and Regular Testing
We uphold the highest security standards using top-tier cybersecurity tools and perform regular testing to guarantee the availability and integrity of your data.
Accessible Expert Support
Our trusted team of experts is readily available to resolve any queries or issues you may have – making your support experience straightforward and efficient.
User-friendly Management Portal
For organizations with an internal IT team, our intuitive management portal allows you to seamlessly manage and initiate disaster recovery services as needed.
Protect your business effortlessly with Zimcom. Let’s get started.
The Importance of Both Backups and Disaster Recovery
While backups protect your data, disaster recovery protects your business. For comprehensive data protection and business continuity, your business needs both.
Regular backups ensure that you have access to the most recent version of your data, minimizing potential data loss. However, keep in mind the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – how much data you can afford to lose. If you’re backing up data offsite once a night, for example, you risk losing an entire day’s worth of data.
Meanwhile, disaster recovery ensures that you can get back up and running quickly after a major disruption. This involves considering your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – how long it takes you to recover your data. If your systems are down for two weeks despite only losing a day’s worth of data, the business impact can be significant.
Zimcom is Your Go-to Partner for Backups and Disaster Recovery Solutions
Data is one of your business’s most valuable assets, and protecting it requires a comprehensive strategy. Regular backups and a robust disaster recovery plan should be integral parts of your business continuity strategy. Remember, it’s not just about protecting your data – it’s about ensuring your business can withstand and recover from disruptions of all sizes.
Zimcom’s automatic data protection outperforms many businesses in the industry. Here’s a quick snapshot the value we provide to our clients:
- 50 copies of your data safely stored and encrypted at all times
- 30 days of free, automatic nightly backups
- 30-50% more cost effective than the Big 3 public cloud providers
- And more!
Book a free, no-obligation consultation with our team to learn more about how we’ll protect your organization for less cost and more value than your current provider.
