Failback

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Overview

Failback refers to the process of returning your system from its secondary location back to its primary location. While failback is sometimes part of scheduled maintenance, it is a crucial part of disaster recovery. Following a disaster, failback often occurs after failover.

What Is Failback?

Failback involves returning a system that has been restored or recovered following a disaster or outage back to its original location or back onto its primary production infrastructure. An essential part of disaster recovery, failback can be set up between on-premises systems, between an on-premises system and the cloud, between cloud and cloud, or any combination of these.

Failback is related to failover, which is the switching of the main system to the secondary location or infrastructure. During failover, the secondary system keeps your systems online and operational, allowing time for the outage to be resolved in the primary production environment. Failback to your original infrastructure or location then occurs when the outage has been rectified.

How Does Failback Work?

Failback is an essential operation, yet it’s often overlooked—it’s nonetheless critical to your disaster recovery and data protection strategy. In today’s always-on world, business continuity has become a requirement at the same time that emergency disruptions, resulting from a number of unavoidable causes, are more common than ever:

Natural disasters
Digital heists and ransomware attacks
System failures and outages

With a disaster recovery plan in place that includes failover and failback, your organization becomes resilient and able to easily resume operations with minimal downtime and data loss.

Example of Failover and Failback over a DR use case

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Confidence in Failback Execution

Zerto has built-in orchestration and automation for all workflows around disaster recovery and data protection. Failback in Zerto can be configured with a single click which will automatically replicate any data changes back to the original location. You can then use our Move operation to gracefully failback your applications in a controlled manner, ensuring zero data loss.

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Live Failover Confidence = Failover Testing

Testing is critical in ensuring your live failover will work as expected. Understand what is involved in a failover test. The same steps in reverse will get your failback.

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