3. High Availability and Disaster Recovery

It is important to safeguard your data not only from a security perspective but to ensure that it is available during an outage – planned or unplanned. This is known as providing business continuity. The ability to respond to local incidents and get back up and running is known as High Availability (HA). For example, say the storage on a physical server fails and you need to switch production to another server quickly. That should be possible within the same data center with minimal impact.

A more catastrophic event, such as the loss of a data center, triggers what is commonly referred to as Disaster Recovery (DR or D/R). D/R generally involves more than just ensuring that a database is ready for use elsewhere. For example, before bringing a database or instance online, ensuring that core aspects of the infrastructure are functioning is crucial.

Both HA and D/R matter and have one purpose: business continuity. Microsoft...