Which statement best describes the difference between high-availability and disaster recovery in telemetry systems?

• A. Disaster recovery plans focus on rapid redundancy; high-availability restores services after major outages.
• B. High-availability minimizes downtime through redundancy and failover; disaster recovery plans restore services after a broader outage.
• C. High-availability is about data retention, disaster recovery about threat detection.
• D. Disaster recovery eliminates the need for backups.

Answer: (B)

High-availability is about keeping telemetry services running with minimal downtime by using redundancy and automatic failover. It’s the design goal to prevent interruptions in real time, so data keeps flowing even if a component fails. Disaster recovery, in contrast, is the plan to restore services after a major outage or disaster, often involving backups, a recovery site, and procedures to bring systems back to operation after the event. In telemetry, this distinction matters because you want fast, continuous data streams (HA) and a separate, tested path to recover fully if a widespread failure occurs (DR), including restoring data and services from backups.

Other choices mix up these roles: disaster recovery isn’t just rapid redundancy, and high-availability isn’t about data retention or threat detection. It also isn’t true that disaster recovery eliminates backups; DR relies on backups and recovery processes.