The fine line between High Availability and Disaster Recovery
On other occasions, we have already mentioned in our blog the problems arising from downtime and which are the most reliable Cloud services.
Today we will analyze the differences between the High Availability and Disaster Recovery and the importance of its application to resolve any incident when downtime occurs.
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High Availability (HA) vs Disaster Recovery (DR)
Used quite often as synonyms, the truth is that each of these concepts presents different implications and benefits. The first of them, the High availability, refers to those systems, or sections thereof, that remains continuously in operation or which are hardly affected by periods of inactivity.
This is, logically, a very desirable situation for SMEs and other professionals, however, it does not yield such good results when there are several problems facing the servers. In this sense, HA reduces network outages but It is difficult to recover lost data.
Instead, the concept of Disaster Recovery It contains something like insurance against catastrophes. It does not create great shields against possible problems, but It helps significantly to recover after suffering one of these setbacks.
Among other functions, the DR performs very complete backups of the data and facilitates the reboot of systems after a service interruption. Consequently, for many professionals it is a more useful tool, since it is almost impossible to reduce downtime to zero.
The sensitive issue of periods of inoperability
Downtime is understood as the period of time in which the service Cloud is not available. Although the most advanced specialized services, such as AWS – Amazon Web Services, have managed to significantly reduce these waiting times, Multi-site SMEs should be prepared to deal with complications of this type.
A relatively long period of downtime can cause serious damage to smaller businesses, especially if most of their activity is channeled through a single server. In fact, the damage is double.
On the one hand, valuable time is lost until the systems are restored to normal. On the other hand, the company may suffer information losses among other disruptions, such as the restoration of service (in this case, post (We have discussed this in detail.) This is where DR saves the day.
Complementary systems
In any case, professionals can combine the advantages HA and DR to protect your business against service outages. With the first option, you can ensure reduced downtime. With the second option, you can get back to normal much more quickly after a network incident. Applied together, they help companies achieve greater fault tolerance, minimizing interruptions for end users.
