ter recovery in a virtual environment. Here, we will discuss the different Disaster Recovery solutions available for server backup. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and the one selected should meet your organization’s specific requirements.

What is IT Disaster Recovery?

IT disaster recovery ensures that if your business loses access to data critical to its operations, the data access can be successfully restored to a pre-disaster state. It is much more than simply “backing up data” and includes planning for communications in the event of a disaster, and recovering business operations that use IT resources as quickly as possible.

What is IT Business Continuity?

Business continuity (BC) is keeping a business running when a disaster occurs, by defining the business backup location, communication, critical processes and systems to support the continuous operation of your business. 

The idea is that if the IT network goes down, customers never know, because business operations are immediately switched to a backup server that can handle the workload. Once the systems are completely recovered onsite, the business process servers take over again without a hitch. But a solution this seamless can be costly, and each organization must define its own goals.

What's the Difference?

If we focus on the R and C in "DR/BC" then comparing recovery and continuous would give us insight to the differences. Disaster Recovery implies that you should be able to “Recover” from a disaster or interruption related to your systems, applications and data. Continuous is defined as “uninterrupted in time; without cessation.” So think about uninterrupted service and access for the entire organization. To help clarify this subtle differences I’d like to compare VMware’s High Availability (HA) product and their Fault Tolerance (FT) product. HA automatically restarts a server if there is an error or incident and minimizes downtime but still requires time for the downed applications to be brought back up. FT on the other hand has two servers running in lock step and if one server is brought down the second server takes over without down time. 

Learn More

Stop being beaten down by the IT recruitment process. Contact us today and learn more about how Paranet can help solve your business technology problems. Click here to schedule a consultation or call us at 214.623.5150.