In IT, downtime is the period during which a system, application or service is unavailable to users, whether because of a failure, a cyberattack or planned maintenance. It is measured in minutes or hours and is often committed to in SLAs (service level agreements). For example, an online store that goes offline during its peak sales season.
Go deeper on the TecnetBlog: Disaster Recovery Plan: What It Is and How to Build One
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Related terms
Recovery testing
Recovery testing is a planned exercise in which data, systems or entire services are restored from backups to confirm that the information is intact and can be recovered within the agreed RTO (recovery time objective). Tests range from restoring a random file to bringing up a full server in an isolated environment, and each test is documented with its result.
Backup types (full, incremental and differential)
Backup types (full, incremental and differential) define which data each backup run copies. A full backup copies everything; an incremental backup copies only what changed since the last backup; and a differential backup copies everything that changed since the last full one. Incrementals use less storage, but a restore needs the full backup plus every incremental, while a differential restore needs only two sets.
Snapshot
In IT, a snapshot is a point-in-time copy of the state of a disk, virtual machine or file system that lets you roll back to that moment within seconds. Because it is usually kept on the same storage as the original data, it does not replace a backup. For example, an administrator takes a snapshot of a server before installing an update.
Air gap
An air gap is the separation of a backup or system from any network so it cannot be reached online. It can be physical, such as a tape stored outside the data center, or logical, such as storage that only connects during the backup window. That way, ransomware that encrypts the network cannot reach the isolated copy.
IT change management
IT change management, also called change control, is the process of planning, assessing, approving and documenting any modification to a company's systems, networks or applications before it goes live. Its goal is to prevent outages and security gaps. For example, a firewall update is scheduled for an agreed maintenance window, with prior testing and a rollback plan.
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