7 Tips to Improve Data Backup and Ensure Business Continuity
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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.
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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