A Glossary of Cloud & Infrastructure Concepts for Data Restore in HR & Recruiting

In today’s fast-paced HR and recruiting landscape, data is your most valuable asset. From candidate pipelines to employee records, ensuring the availability, integrity, and recoverability of this information is paramount. Understanding the fundamental cloud and infrastructure concepts related to data restore isn’t just for IT professionals; it’s essential for HR leaders who need to protect sensitive data, maintain operational continuity, and ensure compliance. This glossary provides clear, actionable definitions of key terms, tailored to help HR and recruiting professionals navigate the complexities of modern data management and safeguarding.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of owning, operating, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, HR teams can access services like applicant tracking systems (ATS), human resource information systems (HRIS), and talent management platforms from a cloud provider. For HR and recruiting, this means greater flexibility, scalability to handle fluctuating hiring volumes, and reduced in-house IT overhead, as the cloud provider manages the underlying infrastructure and often the initial layers of data backup and security. It simplifies access to powerful tools without large capital expenditures.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS is a software distribution model where a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the internet. Most modern HR and recruiting platforms—like Workday, ADP, Greenhouse, or Keap—operate on a SaaS model. This means HR professionals don’t install or maintain software; they simply access it via a web browser. For data restore, understanding SaaS is critical because while the vendor manages the application and its core infrastructure, organizations often retain responsibility for their specific data’s backup, integrity, and compliance within the SaaS environment, especially for custom fields or integrations. Relying solely on a vendor’s default backup may not meet specific business or regulatory needs.

Data Backup

Data backup is the process of creating copies of data that can be used to restore the original data after a data loss event. For HR, this involves duplicating critical information such as candidate profiles, employee records, payroll data, performance reviews, and compliance documents. Effective data backup strategies are crucial to mitigate risks from hardware failures, cyberattacks, human error, or natural disasters. In a recruiting context, a robust backup ensures that if an ATS goes down or data is corrupted, the entire pipeline of active candidates, communications, and hiring progress can be restored quickly, preventing lost talent opportunities and recruitment delays.

Disaster Recovery (DR)

Disaster Recovery (DR) is a set of policies, tools, and procedures that enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster. For HR and recruiting, a DR plan ensures that essential services—like processing payroll, managing new hires, or accessing critical employee data—can resume quickly after a major outage. This often involves replicating HR systems and data to an offsite location or a cloud environment. An effective DR strategy minimizes the operational impact on hiring processes and employee management, protecting the business from significant financial loss and reputational damage during unforeseen crises.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. For example, an RPO of 4 hours means that in the event of a system failure, you are willing to lose no more than 4 hours’ worth of data. In HR, determining the RPO for different data sets is vital: losing a week’s worth of payroll data is catastrophic, while losing a few hours of new job applications might be acceptable if easily reconstructed. Setting appropriate RPOs guides backup frequency; highly critical data (e.g., signed offer letters) requires near-continuous backup to achieve a very low RPO, ensuring minimal data loss.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) specifies the maximum allowable time that a system or application can be down after a disaster or outage before it starts to cause unacceptable damage to the business. For HR operations, an RTO of 2 hours for an ATS means the system must be fully operational within two hours of a failure. A shorter RTO typically requires more robust and often more expensive recovery solutions. HR leaders must balance the cost of achieving a low RTO with the potential impact of downtime on recruitment cycles, payroll processing, and overall employee productivity and morale, making strategic decisions about system availability.

Data Redundancy

Data redundancy involves storing multiple copies of data in different locations or on different systems to prevent data loss due to a single point of failure. This can range from RAID configurations on a single server to replicating entire databases across geographically separated data centers in the cloud. In HR, ensuring redundancy for critical employee files, candidate databases, and confidential agreements is paramount. For example, if one server fails or a cloud region experiences an outage, redundant data copies ensure that HR professionals can still access the information they need, maintaining continuity in recruitment, onboarding, and employee management without interruption.

Data Integrity

Data integrity refers to the overall accuracy, completeness, and consistency of data throughout its lifecycle. It ensures that HR data, such as employee performance reviews, compensation details, or candidate assessment scores, remains unaltered and correct. Maintaining data integrity is crucial in HR for compliance, fair decision-making, and avoiding errors in payroll or benefits administration. Measures like data validation, encryption, access controls, and regular audits help preserve integrity, preventing corruption or unauthorized modifications. In automation, ensuring data integrity across integrated HR systems (e.g., ATS to HRIS) is vital to avoid propagating incorrect information and impacting downstream processes.

Data Encryption

Data encryption is the process of transforming information into a secure, coded format to prevent unauthorized access. It scrambles data using an algorithm, making it unreadable without the correct decryption key. For HR, encryption is a fundamental security measure for protecting highly sensitive and confidential information such as Social Security numbers, bank details, medical records, and compensation data, both when data is at rest (stored) and in transit (moving across networks). Compliance regulations like GDPR and CCPA often mandate encryption for personal data, making it indispensable for safeguarding employee and candidate privacy and avoiding severe legal penalties.

Data Retention Policy

A data retention policy is a set of guidelines that dictates how long an organization must keep certain types of data. These policies are driven by legal, regulatory, and business requirements. In HR, this means defining how long applicant data, employee records, payroll information, and exit interview feedback must be stored before being securely disposed of. For example, some regulations require keeping tax records for seven years, while applicant data might need to be retained for a specific period after a hiring decision. Such policies directly impact data backup strategies, archival practices, and compliance audits, ensuring that HR avoids legal risks associated with both insufficient and excessive data storage.

CRM Backup

CRM backup, specifically relevant for recruiting, involves creating copies of data stored within Customer Relationship Management systems that are often repurposed or used as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), such as Keap or HubSpot. This data includes candidate profiles, communication logs, recruitment stages, interview notes, and offer details. A dedicated CRM backup strategy protects the entire recruitment pipeline from accidental deletion, data corruption, or system failures. For HR and recruiting teams, ensuring the recoverability of this data is critical to maintain hiring momentum, preserve historical candidate interactions, and prevent the loss of valuable talent intelligence, directly impacting the ability to fill roles efficiently.

API (Application Programming Interface)

An API is a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. It allows different software systems to communicate and exchange data securely. In HR and recruiting, APIs are the backbone of automation, enabling seamless data flow between platforms like an ATS, HRIS, background check services, and payroll systems. For example, an API might allow candidate data to automatically transfer from an ATS to an HRIS upon hiring. Understanding APIs is crucial for data restore and integration planning, as they dictate how data moves and where potential integration points for backup or data validation might exist, ensuring data consistency across disparate systems.

On-Premise Infrastructure

On-premise infrastructure refers to IT systems and data that are hosted and managed locally within an organization’s own physical data centers or server rooms, rather than by a third-party cloud provider. Historically, many HRIS and payroll systems were run on-premise. While this offers greater direct control over hardware and security, it also places the full burden of maintenance, upgrades, and, critically, data backup and disaster recovery on the in-house IT team. For HR, an on-premise setup means being solely responsible for implementing robust backup solutions, testing recovery plans, and allocating significant resources to prevent data loss and ensure system availability, a stark contrast to the shared responsibility model of cloud services.

Virtualization

Virtualization is technology that allows multiple operating systems and applications to run concurrently on a single physical hardware system, such as a server. It creates “virtual machines” (VMs) that function like independent computers. This technology is foundational to cloud computing, enabling efficient resource utilization. For HR and IT teams, virtualization can improve server efficiency, simplify disaster recovery by easily moving VMs, and consolidate IT infrastructure. In a data restore context, understanding virtualization helps in recovering entire virtual servers or specific applications within a VM, speeding up the restoration of HR systems without needing to rebuild physical hardware, ensuring quicker return to operation.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is a comprehensive organizational strategy to ensure that critical business functions can continue during and after a disaster or disruptive event. While Disaster Recovery (DR) focuses specifically on IT systems, BCP is broader, encompassing people, processes, and technology. For HR, BCP means having plans in place for critical functions like payroll processing, emergency communication with employees, and continuing vital recruitment activities even if offices are inaccessible or primary systems are down. It includes strategies for alternative workspaces, communication protocols, and cross-training staff, ensuring that the human capital aspect of the business remains operational and protected, working hand-in-hand with data restore efforts.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Selective Field Restore in Keap: Essential Data Protection for HR & Recruiting with CRM-Backup