Following on from our first Disaster Recovery blog, where we discussed how to make your DR plan, we thought we’d provide some further insight into this topic by helping you with some of the terminology you might hear when talking about disaster recovery, checkmout our top 10 below:
1. Backup
Copying data to ensure instant access in the event the original version was lost, corrupted, or destroyed. Backups are generally classified in two categories: onsite, as in locally stored within your own data centre, or offsite in a remote location.
2. Business Continuity
A program designed to ensure an organisation has the plans, procedures, and processes in place to keep the business running smoothly. From natural disasters to employee mishaps, business continuity covers every possible disruptive scenario and works to minimise the risks to the organisation.
3. Contingency plan
A strategy an organisation employs to ensure the continuity of a specific system. For example, you may outline a particular set of processes to protect your web server from failure, but have different plans for server hardware.
4. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
A professional IT solution that sees disaster recovery services delivered by a third-party provider. Typically delivered from a cloud computing platform, DRaaS may include continuous data protection, point-in-time recovery, and failover. DRaaS can be incredibly useful to organisations that may not be able to dedicate the resources to effectively provision, manage, and test a disaster recovery plan in-house.
5. Failover
The process of shifting operations to a recovery site. For example, if your data centre experiences an outage, delivering your disaster recovery plan would include a failover to the site you have provisioned in advance.
6. Outage
Describes the interruption of IT, communications, and other essential systems. An outage may impact an organisation’s ability to operate for an extended period.
7. Point-in-Time Recovery
A data restoration method that enables a system to be recovered to a specific point in time rather than the most recent backup. Known as PIT recovery, this can be used to restore disk volumes, databases, and individual files to a working state before the failure occurred.
8. Recovery Drill
Testing the disaster recovery plan, effectively a fire drill for your DR. This will test the recovery team’s level of preparedness for an emergency and help identify potential issues for improvement.
9. Service Level Agreement (SLA)
A contractual agreement that covers the scope of services provided to a customer. An SLA generally outlines the service provider’s responsibilities and any other factors relating to a disaster scenario.
10. Uptime
Describes the availability of a given system or application. IT environments housing critical data typically aim for maximum uptime and minimal disruptions.
A wider glossary can be taken from our DRaaS partner StorageCraft’s disaster recovery blog.