A Modern Approach to Backup & Disaster Recovery
The upcoming approach towards data protection and disaster recovery is no longer meeting the complexity of today’s data centers. IT companies are vital for the health of the companies whether of any size. Organizations continue to monitor their mission-critical IT infrastructure to detect and mitigate the issues that might disrupt their services. There are multiple trends on a collision course:
- Increased complexity: IT infrastructures are mainly combination of physical, virtual, cloud and multi-cloud environments, and often employ multi-tier applications.
- Cloud and remote computing: Business critical data and applications are now basically in running environments where the traditional on-premises backup and disaster recovery (DR) approaches fall short such as in cloud computing environments and on remote employee laptops.
- Lower tolerance for downtime: In 2019, 12% more survey respondents expect to recover from downtime in less than 4 hours as compared to the respondents in 2018.
- Stretched IT resources: IT budgets or headcounts are limited or reduced while data volume continue to increase exponentially.
Therefore, a new approach to backup and disaster recovery is required. IT needs to stop expecting downtime and manual IT intervention for recovery. Today’s data centers require automatic resilience. The backup and recovery issues need to be detected and removed before they jeopardize a backup or make a recovery fail. The complexity of today’s IT infrastructure has moved beyond the scope of manual, human intervention.
Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan
The new backup and disaster recovery technologies are addressing these issues automatically, making backup and recovery effortless and invisible to the enterprise stakeholders. The only way for IT to meet these challenges is through automation. AI and machine learning tools can help with better data protection and hassle-free as possible. These technologies mainly help in:
- Active-Monitor and Backup: Best-in-class see issues as soon as they happen and determine whether configurations may cause failure before even the backup runs.
- Automate Remediation: Next-gen backup and recovery solutions saves IT time and eliminate downtime with the reduced risk by automatically correcting issues like VSS errors, low drive space, network connectivity, and other issues.
The underlying message is that the disaster can occur anytime and anywhere, what we need to do is to have a reliable backup plan that can be effective. This is especially important when it includes customers and other financial information that can be disastrous for the company’s reputation and business continuity. The backup plan needs to contain three main strategies:
- Data Retention: It must be clear where data is being stored and which files are being packed up. To recover from a disastrous loss, a full copy of your infrastructure is required not just a copy of your files. The company must look at how often they need to backup data and needs regular update.
- Recovery ability: The time for recovery needs to be considered. How long your business can afford without your IT systems? This will also influence what type of tech and support you will require for your required timeframe.
- Security: Ensure that the disaster recovery is secure and protected. You need to have solid connectivity to protect while transferring your data and information.
Testing Your Backup
Other than performing a regular backup, companies need to test whether the tools are working properly. Failure to restore organization data, systems and processes can cause serious damage to your company and business continuity. Lost data and organizational downtime can result in regulatory investigations, lost business and even damage to the brand reputation.
Frequent testing of your tools can help you prevent the damage and alarm you with the warning signs that can cause damage to your data. However, the issue with regular backup and disaster testing is time. Performing administrative tasks can become very time consuming and over the course of a year it accumulates into a substantial amount of IT resources.
Backup Systems and Managed Services
TechNEXA Technologies offer a fully managed backup and disaster recovery solutions for business of all sizes. With this system, we not only take care of the day-to-day running of your backup solutions as we perform them at the frequency of your choosing. Additionally, we also perform the management and testing of your backup and disaster solutions, with continuous monitoring of your backups, identifying your problems and maintain the integrity of your data.
