With hurricane season upon us, it is increasingly important for businesses to back up their data assets to maintain continuity that can weather any storm. According to a recent survey by Acronis, approximately one-third of U.S. businesses reported having no backup and disaster recovery strategy in place. Acronis, a provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, has issued five tips to help businesses ensure all their critical data is fully protected and can be recovered quickly in the event of a hurricane or other natural disaster.
Click through for five disaster recovery tips from Acronis.
To ensure that companies can be up and running quickly, make images of computers and servers so full copies of data and applications are safely tucked away. You can either store on different machines, in different locations or reach for a cloud solution. In the event that something happens, the images can be loaded onto new hardware in hours rather than days.
Onsite backups are great for day-to-day recovery, but they can also be destroyed during a disaster. You should consider an off-site data storage solution, or as an alternative, contract with a cloud service provider to not only back up to the cloud, but also recover onto virtual machines.
Hardware-agnostic software can recover from the backup image of the failed system onto any available hardware and replace the old machine's hardware drivers with the new ones, a process that takes only about 15 minutes. Virtualization users can opt to recover mission-critical machines even more quickly by recovering either a physical or virtual machine disk image to a standby virtual machine. It can then be launched immediately with a mouse click.
Use a backup and recovery solution that takes care of backups and recoveries of all your machines. For ease of management consider a solution that protects all the platforms you're using. Then, if disaster strikes, your organization can much more easily coordinate a recovery that will minimize or eliminate the potential for lost productivity.
Make sure if disaster does strike, you know how to get your data back quickly. Look for data protection and disaster recovery solutions that provide a step-by-step guide to recover your systems and files. It is rare that the person who made the backup is the same person on hand to recover when disaster does strike!
