Amsterdam, Nederland. September 2025 – Sean Tilley, EMEA Sales Director bij 11:11 Systems, een leverancier van beheerde infrastructuuroplossingen, deelt zijn inzichten over hoe bedrijven hun bedrijfskritische workloads kunnen moderniseren en beschermen met een uniforme aanpak van beschikbaarheid en herstel.
In today’s hyper-connected digital economy, uptime is critical, and while downtime is a bad thing, it also poses a threat to a company’s reputation, revenue, and customer trust. Enterprises are expected to provide seamless, uninterrupted services 24 hours a day. But while many organizations are eager to invest in high-availability (HA) infrastructure, they often overlook the equally critical need for disaster recovery (DR). Because making sure your systems are available is different from making sure they’re recoverable.
To build a truly resilient enterprise, companies need to understand the different roles of HA and DR and how integrating both into the company’s structure can protect operational activities from everything from minor hardware failures to catastrophic cyberattacks.
So how do organizations modernize and protect their mission-critical operations with a unified approach to availability and recovery?
High availability: Minimize daily interruptions
First, let’s see what we mean when we talk about HA. It’s all about continuity. HA ensures that systems remain operational even when individual components fail. The focus is on minimizing service disruptions through redundancy, load balancing, and failover mechanisms. The HA architecture is designed to address local issues such as hardware failures, network latency or outages, software crashes, and power failures.
Take, for example, a web application that is hosted on multiple servers in different availability zones and remains available to users at all times, even if a server goes down. This resilience is essential to maintain uptime and meet service level agreements (SLAs).
According to a report by Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is around €4,800 per minute. This indicates how important HA is in minimizing losses. In addition, a Forrester survey found that 70% of organizations consider HA a critical part of their digital transformation strategy. However, HA has its limits. It is not designed to recover from large-scale disruptions such as ransomware attacks, data corruption, natural disasters, and major regional power outages.
Having redundant systems in place is simply not enough in these scenarios. You need a disaster recovery plan (DR) to recover data, applications, and infrastructure and ensure business continuity. DR provides a helping hand, providing the strategy, tools, and processes to recover systems and data after a significant disruption.
Disaster recovery: Recover from the worst-case scenario
Simply put, DR is the safety net that catches your business when high availability falls short. DR focuses on data backup and replication, recovery time objectives (RTO), recovery point objectives (RPO), failover to secondary locations, and testing and validating recovery plans.
Unlike HA, which is reactive and immediate, DR works proactively and strategically. It prepares the organization for worst-case scenarios and ensures that even if primary systems are compromised, the business can recover quickly and with minimal data loss.
HA basically ensures that you can continue to work with everyday problems, while DR recovers systems after major disruptions.
The Costly Confusion: HA Is Not the Same as DR
Despite their different roles, HA and DR are often combined. Many companies assume that because they have invested in HA infrastructure, they are covered in the event of a disaster. This misunderstanding can cost them dearly.
Think of a company with mirrored servers and automatic failover. If ransomware encrypts data on all nodes, HA will simply replicate the corrupted data. Without a DR strategy that includes clean backups and isolated recovery environments, the business can’t move forward.
Therefore, modern enterprises must take a two-pronged approach: HA for continuity, DR for recovery. Together, they form the backbone for a company’s true resilience.
Integrating HA and DR for business continuity
To achieve seamless business continuity, organizations must integrate HA and DR into a cohesive strategy. This includes:
Risk assessment: identification of potential threats and vulnerabilities in infrastructure, applications and data.
– Establish SLAs: Establish clear RTO and RPO goals based on a business impact analysis.
– Implement redundancy: Use HA to minimize downtime due to local outages.
– Implement DR solutions: Ensure that off-site backups, replication, and failover mechanisms are in place.
– Regular testing: Conduct DR exercises and HA failover tests to verify preparedness.
– Continuous monitoring: Using real-time analytics, detect issues before they escalate.
This integrated strategy minimizes disruptions and enables rapid recovery, while maintaining data integrity and customer trust.
Increasing resilience in the cloud
We help our customers modernize, protect, and manage mission-critical applications and data with a comprehensive suite of services that combine high availability with robust disaster recovery. Our cloud infrastructure is designed for reliability and scalability, so our customers can continue business operations even during unexpected disruptions.
Further, our Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offering is designed to protect against data loss and downtime, ensuring continuous data replication to secure remote locations and granular recovery options from individual files to entire systems. DRaaS supports both hybrid and multi-cloud deployments with fast failovers to secondary environments. With DRaaS, organizations can recover quickly and confidently from ransomware attacks, system failures, and natural disasters. Whether it’s a financial institution that secures sensitive data or a retail brand that needs to provide customers with 24/7 access, DRaaS provides the tools and support to keep your business running.
Resilience is not optional
In a world where digital services are the lifeblood of business, resilience is not a luxury, but a necessity. High availability keeps the lights on. Disaster recovery ensures that they are restored when they go out. Together, they form the basis for business continuity.
Organizations that view HA and DR as interchangeable risk being unprepared when disaster strikes. But organizations that choose an integrated strategy powered by partners like 11:11 Systems can confidently navigate disruptions, protect their data, and maintain customer trust.
Resilient companies are the future. And resilience starts with the right strategy, the right tools and the right partner.
Contact
Destiny Gillbee
11-11systems@c8consulting.co.uk
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