Cloud Backup vs Disaster Recovery: Key Differences

Disaster recovery and cloud backup are two important data protection strategies that organizations need to consider. While related, there are some key differences between disaster recovery and cloud backup that organizations should understand. In this in-depth article, I will cover the following topics:

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery refers to the strategies and plans organizations put in place to resume IT operations in the event of a disruption. Disaster recovery focuses on restoring technology infrastructure and systems after a disaster. The goal is to minimize downtime and data loss.

Some key things to know about disaster recovery:

• Disaster recovery is about planning for and recovering from catastrophic events like natural disasters, cyber attacks, hardware failures, or human errors that bring down business-critical systems.

• Disaster recovery requires creating a plan that identifies critical systems and data, and outlines step-by-step procedures to recover those systems and data.

• The plan should designate disaster recovery teams, outline communication protocols, and detail the technology, resources, backups, alternative sites, and procedures needed to restore systems.

• Disaster recovery exercises should be conducted regularly to test and improve the disaster recovery plan.

• The goal is to resume business operations as quickly as possible with minimal data loss. Recovery time and data loss objectives are often defined in the disaster recovery plan.

What is Cloud Backup?

Cloud backup refers to backing up data and files to a remote cloud storage environment as opposed to local servers or external hard drives. Some key points about cloud backup:

• Cloud backup provides an offsite copy of data that is accessible for restore or disaster recovery purposes if the primary on-premises data is compromised or unavailable.

• Data is transmitted over the internet and stored in a cloud provider’s data center. Popular providers include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Rackspace.

• Cloud backup offers benefits like lower costs, greater scalability, and geographic redundancy compared to traditional backup.

• Data can be backed up on a regular schedule, and historic versions can be saved for a period of time to enable point-in-time restore.

• Backups can be automated and managed through a web interface. Data is encrypted to prevent unauthorized access.

Key Differences Between Disaster Recovery and Cloud Backup

While disaster recovery and cloud backup are complementary strategies, there are some important differences between the two:

Focus

• Disaster recovery focuses on restoring technology infrastructure and systems to resume operations after a disaster.

• Cloud backup focuses on copying data to an offsite cloud environment to prevent data loss and for recovery of individual files or datasets.

Scope

• Disaster recovery plans for the recovery of entire applications, systems, networks, and critical technology components needed to run the business.

• Cloud backup covers storing copies of data in the cloud, not entire systems. Individual files or datasets can be restored as needed.

Resilience Testing

• Disaster recovery requires periodic testing through simulated exercises to validate the recovery plan.

• Cloud backup requires much less rigorous testing – mainly validating backups and restores periodically.

Recovery Timeframe

• The goal of disaster recovery is to resume operations as quickly as possible. The disaster recovery plan outlines recovery time objectives for critical systems – often several hours or less.

• Recovery timeframes for cloud backup depend on the amount of data being restored. Individual files can be quickly recovered, while full restores take much longer.

Dependencies

• Disaster recovery relies on potentially complex orchestration across multiple systems, alternative equipment, networks, replication tools, spare infrastructure, and teams.

• Cloud backup relies on just the cloud backup service and internet connectivity. No orchestration across multiple components needed.

Costs

• Effective disaster recovery requires investment in planning, redundancy, alternative sites, and technology solutions resulting in higher costs.

• Cloud backup has a much lower cost to set up and manage, with the cloud provider owning the infrastructure.

Why You Need Both Disaster Recovery and Cloud Backup

While cloud backup and disaster recovery serve different primary purposes, organizations need elements of both data protection strategies for comprehensive coverage:

• Use disaster recovery to get critical systems back online quickly with minimal data loss to resume business operations after a significant disruption.

• Use cloud backup as a cost-efficient way to back up data offsite so it can be recovered in the event of data loss or corruption.

• Cloud backup supports disaster recovery by providing offsite copies of data needed for recovery. Backup data can be used to seed and accelerate restoring systems from scratch if needed.

• Disaster recovery protects cloud backup by planning for scenarios where cloud services are unavailable for extended periods. This may require alternative backup destinations.

Adopting both strategies provides layered data protection for enhanced resilience. The details of the disaster recovery plan and scope of cloud backup should complement each other. With both solutions in place, organizations can feel confident in their ability to withstand and recover from disruptions.

Key Takeaways

• Disaster recovery focuses on restoring technology infrastructure and systems after disasters; cloud backup focuses on copying data offsite to prevent data loss.

• Disaster recovery has broader scope across multiple systems; cloud backup handles individual datasets.

• Disaster recovery requires more rigorous resilience testing; cloud backup requires less frequent validation.

• Disaster recovery aims to restore operations quickly; recovery timeframes for cloud backup depend on amount of data.

• Disaster recovery relies on orchestration across many components; cloud backup relies solely on backup service and internet connectivity.

• Both solutions are important for comprehensive data protection at reasonable cost.

By understanding the key differences, organizations can leverage disaster recovery and cloud backup together as part of a robust data resilience strategy.