7 Tips to Improve Data Backup and Ensure Business Continuity
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Intuitive User Experience
Tip 6: Get a solution with an intuitive user experience.
For simple efficiency, you want a tool that simplifies and streamlines all backup-and-recovery tasks, from those performed routinely to those performed only rarely. A modern, intuitive user experience is a priority so it should always be possible to operate your backup system without referring to a manual. Additionally, substitutes or managers should be able to do it when primary admins are unavailable. Easy user interfaces make it simple to reduce costs for training, support and fixing mistakes.
An intuitive user experience is even more crucial during a disaster. By their nature, disaster recovery tools will be used in times of great stress. Operators must react quickly and accurately, as they cannot afford to make mistakes that compound the disaster. Unfortunately, error rates typically soar when operators are under stress. Therefore, tools should actively guide users through the steps they need to follow, clearly explaining what will happen when they do, and what is taking place at every step of the process.
Over the past decade, great strides have been made to create a more optimal user experience, as developers of consumer software have learned to streamline tasks, rely more on visuals and intuitive icons, and build interfaces that are more navigable. Not all enterprise backup/recovery systems reflect this consumer-driven innovation. Choose the tools that do, as they will make a huge difference in your confidence that your business can recover from 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.
Related Topics : A Big Market for Big Data Jobs, Midmarket CIO, IT Management Automation, SharePoint, Technology Markets
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