Confused about disaster recovery, high availability and other related terms you may have heard thrown around in the IT industry? You’re not alone. Keeping IT systems up and running is a complex undertaking, so it’s no surprise we have a complex vocabulary to describe all the different factors that go into that undertaking. In this guide, we’ll try to clear up some of the confusion, and provide additional resources to help you learn what goes into achieving resilient digital infrastructure.
Business continuity: An overall strategy for minimizing downtime and ensuring that essential business functions continue in spite of disruption. A business continuity plan must account for both planned outages due to scheduled maintenance and upgrades and unplanned outages caused by emergencies and natural disasters.
Learn more:
How to Speak Like a Data Center Geek: BC/DR
Disaster recovery: The subset of business continuity that deals specifically with unplanned outages, and how to get IT systems back online as quickly as possible in the aftermath of such an outage.
Learn more:
Navigating Disaster Recovery with Equinix and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Deploying Offsite Disaster Recovery Infrastructure at the Digital Edge
High availability: Another subset of business continuity. While disaster recovery is about getting systems back online as quickly as possible after an unplanned outage, high availability is about protecting systems against threats while they’re still running, so that there is no outage in the first place.
Learn more:
Creating a High-Availability Strategy for a Hybrid World
Architecting High-Availability Solutions with Equinix Fabric
Redundancy: The duplication of IT infrastructure components across locations and/or service providers. Establishing redundancy is a key aspect of any business continuity strategy.
Learn more:
Geo-Redundancy: A Top Business Priority in the Digital Era
3 Ways to Reduce Network Downtime Risk with Geo-Redundancy
Resilience: The end goal of any business continuity plan. Your infrastructure is resilient when unplanned downtime is rare, and you can minimize disruption even when it does occur.
Learn more:
Architecting for Azure Cloud Resiliency with Equinix Fabric
How to Ensure Network Resilience in Uncertain Times
How Equinix helps customers meet their business continuity goals
Read these case studies to learn how Equinix helped real customers achieve resilient infrastructure and minimize system downtime, in addition to other business benefits.
Resilient, Agile Digital Infrastructure Keeps Mercury Building
Global Coffee Company Improves Cloud Performance and Eliminates Outages
Equinix Interconnects CELSA to Improve Performance + Lower Costs
Subscribe to the Equinix Blog