The difference between DR and Backup in Google Cloud – Which type will be suitable for businesses?

07/07/2023

Understanding the Differences between DR and Internal Backup Google Cloud is critical to minimizing the impact of downtime, avoiding downtime that damages business revenue. Especially in the current era of digital transformation, any outage event can disrupt customer interactions, reduce employee productivity, destroy data and freeze processes. business operations.

Differences between DR and Backup in Google Cloud

Therefore, distinguishing between DR and Backup as well as defining key terms and evaluating the pros and cons between different deployment technologies can help you develop effective strategies to avoid the harmful effects of DR and Backup. business interruption.

Table of contents

What do Backup and Disaster Recovery mean?

Backup and Disaster Recovery Both aim to protect you in the event of an IT system failure, but these are two different methods

Backup is an additional physical or virtual copy of data on another storage device (hard drive, CD/DVD, flash drive, cloud storage, etc.). If you lose some data, you can use its backup to restore the original data.
Disaster Recovery (DR) is a step-by-step plan for responding to IT incidents by migrating to secondary IT infrastructure. DR ensures critical functions continue to operate continuously during natural or man-made disasters.

Differences between DR and Backup in Google Cloud 1

Why use Backup or Disaster Recovery?

Having your IT system knocked down will have extremely harmful effects on your business. It will cause leakage, loss of information and worst of all, the business operations of the enterprise will not be able to continue. However, with each form of business, the harm caused will also be different. For example, e-commerce Web sites stand to lose more than organizations that can still operate offline. Applying Backup or Disaster Recovery will ensure that you can resume operations almost immediately after an IT incident.

Differences between DR and Backup in Google Cloud 2

Differences between DR and backup in Google Cloud

Below are the differences between DR and Backup compared through the criteria closest to each business

Criteria	Backup	DR
Purpose	Provides a copy of data in case something goes wrong with the original data	Ensure your business can restore functionality and avoid downtime in the event of unforeseen circumstances
Final result	A copy of the original data	A working copy of the IT system is on standby
Major risks are overcome	Server crashes, minor cyber attacks, data deletion, and hardware failures	Region-wide incidents (tornadoes, fires, power outages, etc.) and large-scale cyber attacks
Target device	Servers, workstations, mobile devices	Critical servers, virtual applications
Limit	Back up individual files and virtual machines	A plan DR will be designed to operate at the level of individual departments or the entire enterprise
Ensure business operations continue continuously	Not guaranteed	Always guaranteed
Monopoly	You can have backups without a DR plan	Every DR plan includes some form of backup
Automation	Based on a combination of manual and automated processes	The more automatic the better
Recovery time	Speed is not the deciding factor, so recovery times are often long	Speed is paramount, so recovery time will be much shorter
Resource allocation	Backups are usually compressed and do not require much storage space.	The DR package requires a separate location with a fully functioning IT infrastructure
Complexity	All backup processes are relatively simple	Complexity (setting up additional resources, prioritizing business applications, preparing for different scenarios, etc.)
Data replication interval	By time (hour, day, week, once a month, etc.)	Replication of critical data happens continuously, ideally in real time
Investment	Even top backups are affordable	Top DR plans require investments in secondary IT infrastructure unless you use DRaaS

Above are the similarities and differences between DR and Backup in Google Cloud. If your business is interested in Google Cloud DR or Backup, you can connect with Gimasys - Google's senior partner in Vietnam to get advice on solutions to build applications according to your business's unique needs. Contact now: