Seven Reasons Why Companies Need to Automate Disaster Recovery

Data and IT services make up the lifeline of any modern business enterprise, large or small. Before a data center fault occurs — either one caused by human error or a natural disaster — executives want to be assured that their data is secure and protected. Executives know that downtime equals lost dollars and that every minute spent on recovering data and systems is time taken away from running their business. This results in lack of productivity and poor customer response time. Companies can create a resilient IT infrastructure with automated disaster recovery (DR) for any service, any time and any place. This slideshow features seven reasons why companies need to automate disaster recovery, as identified by Ralph Wynn, senior product marketing manager at FalconStor Software, a leader in data protection and DR.

Click through for seven reasons you should consider automating your organization’s disaster recovery process, as identified by Ralph Wynn, senior product marketing manager at FalconStor Software.

Traditional methods consist of hundreds of steps to recover data and applications. IT staff is often required to reboot servers, applications and infrastructure. Should an error occur during the process, the complete recovery may take twice as long. To address these issues, companies are turning to replication and automated technologies for DR, since they eliminate these complex steps by automating them.

Data and applications are at the forefront of any company, and without them business processes suffer. Companies want to ensure that their websites are operating properly and are allowing customers to access information. When the data center fails, customers can’t research services or purchase products, the sales team can’t access details on potential customers, finance is unable to balance the budget or distribute checks and reports are lost. 

We are often alerted if a natural disaster is expected to strike, but we can’t predict other causes of data center failures. Outages can be the result of malicious acts or simple human error. Data protection systems employing replication and automated DR solutions enable IT administrators to build resilient infrastructures that will keep data and applications accessible during outages and avert downtime.

Companies face a surge in data growth, hybrid environments and limited budgets and staff. However, data center professionals must ensure they have an insurance policy — also known as a disaster recovery plan. Automated DR and data replication solutions keep data centers functioning around the clock.

The value of automated disaster recovery is that it can recover complete IT services at once. Services are made up of data, files, applications, servers and other components. If a data center manager only restores data and the application on which it resides is not available, the data is useless. Data center managers must look at DR from an IT services point of view.

IT staff can initiate a carefully designed and tested automatic DR process with the click of a mouse. A fully automated DR system will initiate a series of actions in a precise order that reinstates one component after another until the complete service is on line – eliminating time-consuming manual procedures.

With automated DR, IT staff can avoid late night calls about outages that have made customers angry. Automated DR eliminates stress and saves countless hours, so data center managers can focus on more strategic projects. Rather than looking for lost files that someone may have accidentally deleted, data center managers can put out numerous fires with ease.