The technical infrastructure used by most businesses today is both more complex and more critical than ever. Environments are a mix of physical servers, virtual machines, and public, private, and hybrid clouds. The functions they provide are integrated tightly into core business functions; digital transformation means that every department depends on technology and every application is mission critical. No one can afford the cost of extended downtime, when each minute means losing thousands of dollars plus damaging your reputation.
With environments like these, it’s important to use disaster recovery tools that can manage your complete environment. Look for a solution that can handle your entire infrastructure with these key features:
- Backup virtual machines, physical servers, and cloud services. Your data needs protection wherever it resides, meaning you need a backup solution that can handle all these different platforms (including multiple operating systems and hypervisors).
- Fast backup and faster recovery. Backups are meant to prevent downtime, so a comprehensive backup needs to be fast, with minimal impact on your business operations. It’s even more important that you’re able to recover from unplanned downtime rapidly, so look for a solution that offers flexible recovery options: you should be able to restore anything from a single file, a single volume, or a full server.
- Easy to manage and highly automated. The less manual work involved, the less likely there’ll be errors that delay the backup and recovery process. At the same time, hands-off backup and recovery shouldn’t mean eyes off; you need a clear, easy to use console that lets your team see what’s going on and intervene when needed. Plus, simple interfaces to make the tool quick to learn—important when IT teams experience both high turnover and budget cuts that eliminate specialization.
- Backups are protected offsite. On-site backups are fine when there’s a local outage, but when there’s a major disaster that takes out your entire data center, you need access to your backups to restore operations in a secondary processing site. Consider a solution that stores backups in the cloud, where they’re safe and accessible from anywhere. Of course, your backups need to be encrypted both in transit to and when they’re stored in the cloud.
- Disaster recovery is easy to test. Backup and disaster recovery tools are part of a larger disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Having a plan that fails can be worse than not having a plan at all, so it’s important to be able to test your plan. Look for a tool that makes it easy to test your recovery and verify that you’re getting the protection you think you are.
Finding a solution that offers all these benefits can be challenging. dcVAST supports a number of backup and recovery solutions, including Veeam, NetBackup, and Disaster Recovery as a Service. Contact us to craft a disaster recovery solution that easily copes with the complexity of your business.
