IBM: What's the Difference? Backup vs. Disaster Recovery

The Truth in IT: Why This Topic Matters Today

Backup and disaster recovery are often used interchangeably, but as IBM highlights in this session, they solve very different problems. In 2025, ransomware, cloud outages, and extreme weather events have made the distinction more urgent than ever. A nightly backup might protect you from a corrupted database, but it won’t help much if your entire primary region goes offline. That’s where disaster recovery — with its emphasis on streaming replication and fast failover — becomes essential.

Key Takeaways from IBM’s Perspective

• Backup = point-in-time protection. You capture snapshots so you can restore after small-scale failures like hardware crashes or malware.

• Disaster recovery = continuous availability. You maintain a standby environment that minimizes downtime when large-scale outages hit.

• One doesn’t replace the other. A robust strategy combines both, ensuring you can recover quickly from minor setbacks and major disruptions alike.

Why This Video Is Different

This isn’t just a high-level marketing talk — Bradley Knapp (IBM Cloud) walks through real-world failure scenarios, highlights common misconceptions, and explains how to align recovery objectives (RPO, RTO) with your organization’s risk tolerance. If you’re making decisions about cloud resilience, this discussion is worth watching closely.

The lesson for IT leaders is clear: backup protects data, disaster recovery protects operations. Both are essential if you want to minimize downtime and data loss in today’s threat landscape.