Recovery Assurance Technology
Tip 4: Use recovery assurance technology and have complete confidence.
IT organizations have long struggled with backup and DR testing. Legacy solutions require manual testing that is disruptive to the business and can cost up to $40,000 per test. As a result, many organizations rarely test their backups, if at all. Alternatively, they might test the integrity of backup data or just do a quick check to see if VMs boot, but neglect to test if they are able to quickly recover complex n-tier applications. Fortunately, these issues can now be solved through automated testing.
Using new recovery assurance tools, you can automate testing of even the most complex backup environments. You can now define Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recover Time Objective (RTO) performance targets on a per-application basis, and then configure your tool to test each app as often as needed: monthly, weekly or even daily.
Automated tools can now spin up and validate workloads within your offsite disaster recovery environment, using backups stored there. They can test complex n-tier applications to ensure that all interfaces and configurations are working properly, and nothing has drifted out of compliance. You even get a timely report certifying that your disaster recovery point will work exactly as expected. This means that if problems are found, they can be pinpointed and solved now — not under the pressure of a disaster.