7 Tips to Improve Data Backup and Ensure Business Continuity
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Consolidate Solutions
Tip 1: Consolidate multiple solutions onto one platform.
As IT environments have become increasingly complex, many organizations have implemented multiple point solutions for backup and recovery. As a result, they wound up with one solution for their virtualized environment; one to protect physical servers running Windows, Linux and UNIX; one to protect endpoints running Windows and Mac; and one to protect cloud apps like Office 365, etc. They usually had good reasons for deploying these tactical solutions, and often had little choice, as conventional enterprise backup solutions were not technically capable of backing up their rapidly evolving portfolios of systems and data. However, this non-integrated backup infrastructure is not only costly but difficult to manage.
Fortunately, you can now consolidate these backup workloads onto a single platform with a unified interface. In doing so, you will be able to maintain fewer licenses, maintenance contracts and service agreements. You will be able to reduce training investments and gain staffing flexibility, as any administrator familiar with the unified interface can step in and handle backup for virtually any system. You can also choose new platforms and suppliers without having to rip out backup systems. And you can hold a single vendor accountable for the performance of all continuity systems.
Improving backup and continuity is frequently listed as a top five priority for IT organizations, but for many organizations, backup and recovery processes need to improve a lot, not just incrementally.
Today, enterprises often run backup tools, and rely on business continuity processes, designed for older platforms developed before elastic clouds, near-ubiquitous virtualized workloads, or SaaS applications began to dominate the IT landscape. Numerous businesses also still use solutions that rely on tape for retaining data. These systems are inefficient, costly, and difficult to manage. They can't scale to serve exponential data growth. They don't respond well to new threats like ransomware. They make it more difficult to execute on digital transformation or other strategic initiatives. Worst of all, you cannot confidently rely on them to work 100 percent of time for minor incidents, never mind during a disaster.
Fortunately, you no longer have to live with these problems. Backup technologies and data recovery (DR) solutions have improved dramatically in recent years. With today's modern solutions, enterprises should be able to transform backup and recovery from a low-level legacy IT function to a modern function delivering continuity and value to the entire business. In this slideshow, Unitrends has identified seven practical steps that can be taken today that will dramatically change how continuity is delivered, while helping to establish disaster recovery systems that support any technology or business strategy.
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