Business Continuity vs. Disaster Recovery vs. High Availability

Business disruptions are inevitable, a hard reality that every organization must face in today’s unpredictable world. As digital and information technologies play a more central role in core business operations, minimizing these disruptions and keeping critical workloads online is essential for long-term business survival. Whether you’re dealing with cyberattacks, natural disasters, supply chain issues, geopolitical risks or core infrastructure failures, IT outages can significantly impact not only the bottom line but also your data, reputation and customer experiences.

A data breach, for instance, could expose sensitive customer data and lead to fines or other punishments for regulatory noncompliance, as well as lost customer trust. A hurricane or flood could damage vital data center infrastructure and lead to an IT outage that disrupts mission-critical applications, making it impossible for customers to complete transactions. These have become common experiences in our world: Data breaches and other cybersecurity threats continue to rise, and natural disasters are increasingly affecting power grids and communication networks.

Without a robust business continuity strategy, organizations are putting their future at risk. In industries like healthcare, financial services and industrial automation, organizations can’t afford for their critical services to be offline for seconds, let alone minutes or days. Lengthy downtime of mission-critical applications and IT systems can destroy a business. To prevent and mitigate these dangers, IT leaders should implement a layered approach combining data protection, high availability and disaster recovery to achieve a level of resilience that meets their evolving requirements.

What is business continuity, and why is a business continuity strategy important?

Business continuity refers to the overarching goal of keeping business operations running during failures, outages or disasters. IT leaders should think of business continuity as a strategy that requires proactive planning, rather than a solution they can buy off the shelf. They must ask themselves, “What approach will guarantee that I can keep my systems and services available, even though I know incidents may happen?”

While business continuity is a priority for a lot of companies, many still haven’t figured out the best way to approach it or what actions to take. A business continuity strategy involves assessing risks and creating a plan for recovery and crisis management. Regarding technology, it involves specifying which systems require simple backup and which ones require the highest availability. For a large enterprise, this can get quite complex.

Different workloads will have different resiliency requirements depending on how critical they are to the business, so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. A business continuity strategy needs to balance the costs and benefits of each solution and measure how well it aligns to the needs of the business. Technical solutions should always be in service to business priorities.

What are disaster recovery and high availability?

Disaster recovery and high availability are components of a larger business continuity strategy. The extent to which you integrate them into your business continuity strategy depends on how resilient you need your various systems to be.

Disaster recovery (DR) is about being able to restore systems and infrastructure when a sizable incident like a natural disaster or major cyberattack occurs. A disaster recovery plan is thus reactive and focused on recovery after an event.

High availability (HA) is about designing systems to maximize uptime for day-to-day operations, typically through redundancy, automated failover mechanisms and load balancing. HA is largely preventative and focused on automating recovery to the largest extent possible.

Some workloads aren’t as critical to business operations and can afford some downtime or data loss. For instance, test environments, archival systems and static informational websites could be recreated from backups or delayed temporarily without major business impacts. Other workloads, like customer-facing applications, financial transaction systems and core operations technology, can’t tolerate downtime or data loss. In these cases, a simple backup or DR solution isn’t sufficient, and HA may be needed.

The way you design and deploy IT infrastructure will be different depending on how much resilience you need. If your organization had unlimited funds, you’d probably make all your systems highly available. But in the real world, you’ll need to make strategic choices about which to prioritize for HA. Your overarching business continuity strategy helps you build in the right level of resiliency for each workload, driven by business KPIs.

IT resilience requires an integrated approach to business continuity

To achieve IT resilience, companies need to implement a layered strategy that combines HA for immediate fault tolerance and DR for long-term recovery, both underpinned by business continuity planning.

Implementing HA/DR architectures can be complex operationally and technically, involving a mix of tools and technologies. You’ll need to not only design the best architecture for resilience but also ensure integration with existing environments. This might strain personnel, especially if your IT team doesn’t have expertise in this area.

To reduce that burden and free up IT teams to focus on the core task of developing business applications and services, organizations may opt to use managed services for their backup or disaster recovery architecture. Managed service providers offer specialized expertise in backup and resilience. They can deliver managed backup and recovery solutions ready-made for HA and DR.

How managed solutions can support your business continuity plan

Equinix offers Managed Solutions that allow enterprises to deploy highly available infrastructure, DR and backup solutions to support a robust business continuity strategy:

• Equinix Managed Private Cloud is a highly available Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution that makes it easy for organizations to configure and operate a resilient architecture. With 24/7 management by Equinix, you don’t have to worry about the infrastructure layer and can instead focus on core business functions.
• Equinix Managed Private Backup helps companies protect data globally while maintaining regulatory compliance and controlling costs. It features high availability and ransomware protection, and can be connected to Equinix Managed Private Cloud via Equinix Fabric®.

Equinix Managed Solutions simplify the implementation of business continuity and DR strategies, eliminating single points of failure, automating failover and recovery, and leveraging geo-redundancy to ensure data and applications remain available even during major disruptions. This allows IT leaders to focus on innovation and growth, confident that their critical infrastructure is resilient and compliant with industry best practices.

Things change very quickly in the IT industry. No matter how well you plan, you’ll need to continuously evolve your business continuity strategy to address changing requirements. That means testing and optimizing your business continuity plan frequently to stay prepared to react to new threats and achieve true IT resilience.

To learn more about Equinix Managed Solutions, download our data sheets on Equinix Managed Private Cloud and Equinix Managed Private Backup.