(Updated 2025)
There is often confusion between failover vs disaster recovery. Both are critical to ensuring the high availability of services. However, in system failure, the two concepts serve very different purposes.
Before discussing failover vs. disaster recovery, it's essential to address the concept of downtime. Downtime is the duration of time a particular system or network is unavailable. Long downtimes can severely impact revenue and customer satisfaction. Minimizing downtime is especially important if your company provides services that need high availability. For example, your company may run a website to which the public needs a connection. Or, your business may provide web services to another company. In both cases, businesses will lose money if services are down.
With that in mind, we explore the differences between failover and disaster recovery. Further, we review how both can help reduce downtime during a system outage.
What Is Failover?
In a Nutshell: Failover vs. Disaster Recovery
Failover: Think of it as an immediate backup system (like a backup internet connection or server) that kicks in automatically during *small, specific outages* to keep things running.
Disaster Recovery (DR): This is the broader plan and set of procedures to recover your entire IT environment after a major catastrophe (like a fire or flood).
Do You Need Both?
Most businesses benefit from implementing both failover for immediate continuity and a DR plan for larger threats to ensure comprehensive protection.
In short, failover is your backup connection or duplicate production server environment. It involves having the connection or environment you can switch to if the main one shuts down unexpectedly.
Failover connectivity involves a duplicate, often different type of connection. The backup connection to a fibre connection would be cellular.
Failover for a server or multiple servers involves moving all services provided by one environment to a duplicate set of servers. The standby machine(s) can be in the same location as the primary system. Or, they may be off-site, depending on your company's data center design.
Machines can go offline in a physical or a cloud computing environment. It can happen to an entire physical server or even a single virtual machine on a server.
Failover ensures your services keep running if there are hardware or infrastructural failures. Effective failover solutions can prevent your business from losing revenue. They can also help to cut service disruptions for end users.
Implementing effective failover often requires reliable hardware designed for seamless switching. Novotech offers a range of cellular routers and gateways built for business continuity.
Explore Failover Hardware Solutions
What Is Automatic Failover?
Automatic failover consists of automatically moving data or applications to the standby server if the primary system fails. The alternative is a passive system where the process happens manually. Most failover processes operate automatically to reduce downtime.
What is the cost of NOT having a failover solution?
The average cost of network downtime for small businesses ranges from $137 to $427 per minute. This figure varies based on industry, organization size, and business model. Downtime impacts not just revenue but also productivity, with significant time required to refocus on tasks post-interruption. Costs include lost revenue, productivity, recovery, and intangibles like brand reputation.
What is Failback?
Once the primary internet connection is restored and stable, failback is the process of switching back from the secondary (failover) connection to the primary connection. This process is important to return to the normal, often more optimal, operating conditions. The goal of failback is to minimize disruption and ensure a smooth transition back to the primary internet source.
What Is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery refers to an organization's procedures to recover its IT infrastructure after a system failure.
A strong disaster recovery plan consists of many disaster recovery strategies such as:
- cold sites and hot sites,
- disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS),
- data backup, and
- virtualization, among others.
Defining Your Recovery Needs: RTO and RPO
When developing a disaster recovery plan, two critical metrics help define your requirements:
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Recovery Time Objective (RTO): This is the maximum acceptable downtime your business can tolerate for a specific system or the entire operation after a disaster strikes. How quickly must you be back online?"
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Recovery Point Objective (RPO): This refers to the maximum amount of data loss your business can afford, measured in time back from the disaster event (e.g., can you lose the last hour of data, or only the last 5 minutes?). How much data can you afford to lose?
Understanding your organization's specific RTO and RPO is fundamental to choosing the right DR strategies (like hot sites vs. cold sites, or specific backup frequencies) and ensuring your plan meets your actual business needs.
Are you looking for a disaster recovery plan template?
Here is a link to a robust disaster recovery plan template for Enterprise from IBM
Here is a link to a disaster recovery plan template for small businesses.
What is the cost of not having a disaster recovery plan?
Small businesses without a disaster recovery plan may face substantial costs due to lost productivity. The average cost of IT infrastructure downtime can be over $300,000 per hour, which includes lost productivity and revenue, as well as recovery costs. However, the actual cost can vary significantly depending on the business's dependency on uptime, the industry, and other factors. It's important for small businesses to consider these potential costs and invest in a disaster recovery plan to mitigate risks
What's the Difference Between Failover and Disaster Recovery?
| Failover | Disaster Recovery | |
| Primary Goal | Maintain uptime during *minor* disruptions | Restore full IT operations after a *major* incident |
| Scope | Specific system, server, or network connection | Entire site, datacenter, or critical infrastructure |
| Typical Trigger | Hardware failure, network outage, power blip | Natural disaster, fire, flood, major cyberattack |
| Activation | Usually automatic, near-instantaneous | Manual or automated process, takes longer (minutes/hours+) |
| Complexity | Generally simpler to implement | More complex, involves comprehensive planning |
| Location | Can be same site or off-site | Typically requires an off-site recovery location |
Like failover, disaster recovery is critical to ensuring high availability and business continuity. However:
- Failover is more relevant for everyday small-scale machine or network failures. A failover system can be in the same location as the previously active system.
- Disaster recovery addresses large-scale infrastructural damage. It involves recovering all services and servers to their original state.
What Does My Business Need?
Businesses need to maximize uptime and ensure it stays protected. We recommend all companies have both a disaster recovery plan and a failover system.
As a first step, failovers are an excellent place to start. Failover will ensure continuity in the event system or machine outages. Failover solutions also tend to be more flexible. You can more easily adapt one to fit your company's needs.
Would you like to test your disaster recovery plan if you have one? See this checklist from IR.com, where they discuss disaster recovery testing and why it's important
Ready to enhance your business continuity with a robust failover system? Novotech offers a wide selection of routers and gateways specifically engineered for reliable failover. Let's work together to build a seamless, cost-effective solution tailored to your needs.
Unsure where to start? Review our "Best Failover Routers" article for advice on appropriate hardware.