Backup and disaster recovery

Ensuring that your IBM® Cloud Pak for Data system is prepared for loss of data or unplanned downtime is one of the most important steps you can take.

Understanding the essentials of backup and disaster recovery is critical for minimizing the impact of unplanned downtime on your business. Across industries, organizations recognize that downtime can quickly result in lost revenue. Unfortunately, natural disasters, human error, security breaches and ransomware attacks can all jeopardize the availability of IT resources. Any downtime can derail customer interactions, sap employee productivity, destroy data and halt business processes.

Differentiating backup from disaster recovery, defining key terms, and evaluating various deployment options and technologies can help you develop effective strategies for avoiding the consequences of downtime.

What are backup and disaster recovery

Backup is the process of making an extra copy (or multiple copies) of data. You back up data to protect it. You might need to restore backup data if you encounter an accidental deletion, database corruption, or problem with a software upgrade.

Disaster recovery, on the other hand, refers to the plan and processes for quickly reestablishing access to applications, data, and IT resources after an outage. That plan might involve switching over to a redundant set of servers and storage systems until your primary data center is functional again.

Some organizations mistake backup for disaster recovery. But as they may discover after a serious outage, simply having copies of data doesn’t mean you can keep your business running. To ensure business continuity, you need a robust, tested disaster recovery plan.