7 Tips to Improve Data Backup and Ensure Business Continuity
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The Cloud
Tip 3: Take advantage of cloud.
Cloud services are transforming the way IT organizations build, manage, deploy, scale up and shut down applications. Backup and disaster recovery are perfectly suited for the flexibility and elasticity that the cloud makes available. If you are not taking advantage of this, you are missing out and likely spending too much money and burning too many cycles on backup and continuity.
By leveraging the cloud in your backup and disaster recovery toolset, you can easily address explosive data growth. Instead of continually buying costly on-premises storage to back up local workloads, you can rely on flexible, expandable cloud storage, and the cloud providers' economies of scale. Hybrid cloud backup also makes it easier to provide the physical isolation you need to protect against ransomware. Further, cloud-based backup can be used as the basis for DR as a Service (DRaaS) in order to quickly recover workloads using cloud compute resources in the event of the disaster.
Cloud-connected appliances can provide fine-grained control over which data to upload to your cloud provider, and which business-critical backups must always stay on-premises for near-instant recovery. To protect network performance, you can throttle bandwidth up or down based on the hour of day, or other network traffic.
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.
Related Topics : A Big Market for Big Data Jobs, Midmarket CIO, IT Management Automation, SharePoint, Technology Markets
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