Disaster Recovery vs. Business Continuity
Disaster Recovery vs. Business Continuity and Why You Should Know the Difference
Just about everything we do today has a technology component to it, so making sure we are prepared to deal with the loss of that technology is very important in keeping your business running and your customers satisfied. For this reason it is important to understand the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity.
Disaster recovery is what is done to bring an IT service back to normal operation after it has stopped functioning. This means the service is not available to be used by your organization or your customers. For an online business this can mean no money coming in and your customers going elseware. Not a good situation. A disaster recovery plan will help you get the service back up and running as quickly as possible. Sometimes this can be done in a very short time period (1 or 2 hours), but other times it can mean days or even weeks.
Business continuity is what is done to have your business function as close to normal while an IT service has stopped functioning. This means that for your organization and customers there is no impact, or limited impact, to the services you provide. It should be business as usual. The only one who should really know there is an issue is the person fixing the service that is not functioning. For an online business this is what is needed, because any time your service is down you are missing opportunities to make money and you risk losing customers.
To sum it up simply:
Disaster recovery; service is down+ customers unable to access site = sales lost... Your staff may be unproductive and you may lose customers.
Business continuity; service is always available+ customers able to access site=continued sales ...Your staff stays productive, your customers are as happy, and you can sleep at night knowing your business is always running.
At Gozooko, business continuity is taken very seriously. We provide many levels of service to meet our customer's needs. We have multiple data centers, two on the west coast and two in the central-midwest, and we are currently building one on the east coast to round out our geographic separation. This allows us to provide a full line of business continuity services for our customers. The Gozooko E service has local business continuity service. The service runs on multiple machines across a single data center to mitigate a single server type of outage. The Gozooko 1 service runs across multiple data centers to mitigate any type of outage or disaster. In the event an entire facility was struck by a disaster the Gozooko 1 service would continue to run uninterrupted in another center.
This provides our customers and their customers as well, with uncompromised service.
If you have any topics you would like to see addressed in this column, or have any questions, please send us an email at GozookoGuys@gozooko.com