Disaster Recovery is the planning and IT strategy put in place by a company in order to limit downtime of any systems, processes or applications that essentially run the business. If a company has a security breach (such as a ransomware attack) or network outages, a Disaster Recovery plan out lines the steps taken in order to set up an alternate environment which your primary environment can fail over to. This is also referred to as Site Level protection. This ensures that all of your mission critical systems can still run, your data is secured, and employees can still access applications which they use to run the business.

A backup plan is just one part of the complete Disaster Recovery plan. Backups are copies of data intended to restore an old version of a file. A company may decide to do daily back ups, and depending on when the failure happened, the company would lose a days worth of data. Backups can be run more often but this usually affects production environments performance. An on-premise back up is usually stored on removable media devices like type drives and taken offsite in case of an emergency. The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for backups is typically days and in extreme cases weeks.

The RTO of a true Disaster Recovery strategy is measured in minutes. With public cloud, backups can now be done utlising cloud storage.