No matter how effective a technology is, there comes a time when it no longer meets the business’ needs and needs to be replaced by a newer, better technology. Is your backup strategy reaching its expiration date? Here’s how to tell.
- Backup and restore times take too long. Businesses today are more dependent on software for core business functions than ever, while data is growing rapidly. A backup strategy that worked for a handful of applications and terabytes of data may not be able to meet your recovery time objectives given the current number of applications you depend on and the current scale of your data.
- You backup everything equally. The simplest strategy is the one least fine-tuned to the business needs: back up everything, always. That results in backups that take longer and need more storage. Instead, it’s more efficient to ignore data that doesn’t need to be backed up and to use deduplication to reduce redundancy and the amount of storage needed for backed up files.
- Your backup solution is a mix of tools. When keeping up with changing demands is handled on an ad hoc basis rather than strategically, you end up with a mix of backup tools that need to be managed separately and mean different systems have different processes for recovery.
- Your backups don’t happen automatically. While backups are a critical function, they shouldn’t require constant human oversight. Effective backup tools can be configured to handle the backup operation automatically and generate alerts when there are issues.
- Backups only reach the data center and the desktop. Your employees are working outside of the office, at home, in airports, and in coffee shops. Any valuable business documents created on their laptops or the other devices they use when out of the office also need protection. This can also require tracking down any “shadow IT” usage of cloud storage employees are using to store files when they work remotely.
If your backups are limited by any of these challenges, it’s time to rethink your backup strategy. Today’s backup solutions help businesses ensure data availability, data protection, and data archiving—all related but distinct concerns. These solutions use a mix of technical approaches, potentially including snapshots, replication, high availability solutions, and other techniques for keeping data current and available as well as supporting a full recovery and meeting compliance mandates. Rather than a random mix of tools, an effective strategy carefully selects the appropriate technologies, whether disk, tape, or cloud, to meet the recovery needs without complicating the recovery process.
dcVAST’s expertise in backup, archiving, and disaster recovery enables us to craft backup solutions that provide your business a comprehensive protection strategy without management complexity. Contact us if you’re ready to rethink your business’ approach to making sure your data is protected and will be there when you need it.
