Why Data Backups Are Not Enough

Backups are essential. Without comprehensive data backups — your business is balanced on the edge of a cliff with the potential to fall at any moment. But backups aren’t enough to guarantee that a business can continue to operate when disaster strikes. Data is only useful when the servers and applications that rely on it are available. It’s good to have data backups when a server goes down or your data center suffers an outage, but backups won’t keep your applications running or allow your employees to keep working.

A backup — however comprehensive and up-to-date — only guarantees that data will be accessible eventually. Your business won’t lose data in the event of a disaster. But it will lose time and money if it can’t put that data to work. Backups aren’t a solution to infrastructure downtime — that is the role of disaster recovery and business continuity services.

Approximately three quarters of businesses experience infrastructure outages in a given year. Most outages aren’t caused by natural disasters like storms and earthquakes. They are caused by human error, power supply issues, hardware failures, or network disruption. Backups don’t help with this type of event, but disaster recovery solutions do.

Steadfast Disaster Recovery Services are capable of replicating key physical servers, virtual machines, and databases to a secure offsite data center alongside comprehensive and up-to-date backups. During an outage, geographic load-balancing and failover systems will automatically switch network traffic to the redundant infrastructure.

Consider what would happen to your business if a rack of servers — including the main database server and a few web servers — in its primary data center was hit by a power outage. From the perspective of customers and employees, the applications that rely on those services would simply stop working.

Of course, all the data on the servers, including the database, is safely backed up to a different location. If there was data loss, backups will be restored when the servers come back online. But what happens in the meantime? Your customers can’t buy products or access services, your employees can’t do their job.

If the business had a disaster recovery strategy in place, the story would be different. Load balancing systems that monitor the services running on the affected servers would see that they are not available. Redundant infrastructure at the disaster recovery location would be activated and virtual machines spun up. The load balancer would redirect network traffic. The result: minimal service disruption and no loss of revenue.

Steadfast’s Disaster Recovery Service combines remote data backups with continuous data protection, geographic load balancing and failover, database and SAN/NAS replication, virtualization failover, and custom planning and testing to provide a comprehensive disaster recovery solution.

Whereas backups ensure that you don’t lose data in the event of a disaster, Steadfast’s Disaster Recovery Service means that you won’t lose time and money.