Resilience · 5 min
Backup, HA and DR are not the same
How to separate three resilience controls and ask better architecture questions.
Backup, high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) address different failure conditions.
Backup preserves recoverable copies
A backup design should identify protected data, frequency, retention, immutability options, locations, encryption, restore procedure and evidence from testing.
High availability reduces selected component failures
HA may use redundant compute, storage, network or application components. It does not automatically protect against application error, data corruption, operator action or a larger location failure.
Disaster recovery restores service after a defined event
DR connects alternate capacity, replicated or restored data, application dependencies, people, communications and a decision runbook. Its value depends on regular testing against workload-specific RPO and RTO objectives.
Ask which failure is being addressed, who performs the action, what evidence is produced and which assumptions remain outside scope.
Turn regional requirements into an architecture your teams can review.
Start with workload placement, connectivity, data flows, recovery objectives, migration risk and the full commercial scope.