Disaster recovery planning: key to business continuity

According to a recent study conducted by Acronis and research house Vanson Bourne, 63% of SMBs would take a day or more to recover from system failure. Imagine how your business would get through a day without access to systems and data.

Perhaps that’s why the recent Virgin Blue debacle proved to be such a jolt of reality, underscoring just how critical it is to have a reliable and comprehensive backup and recovery infrastructure in place. Because of a computer glitch, a major airline suffered reservation data loss, forcing cancellations of over 100 flights and leaving approximately 100,000 passengers stranded. Investing a bit of time in identifying and routinely testing your organisation’s data recovery system is certainly a better way to go than sorting out throngs of angry customers stuck at airports nationwide and handling check-in manually for days.

Over the years, changes in technology have increased the number of disaster recovery options in the face of natural or man-made disasters. Recovery can be simple and fast if suitable solutions are applied, with less work and lower cost. It’s coming just in time, as most organisations have more and more business-critical infrastructures and partner-facing applications that must be available for use 24/7.

Disk imaging: key to fast recovery

Disk imaging-based solutions create an image of the entire disk, including all data and operating system components, which enable users to recover rapidly by restoring the entire image. New data being written to the machine after the image is being backed up can be added into the backup during the next backup session, with no data loss.

The adoption of disk-based backup solutions is also driven by compliance requirements introduced in the past decade related to privacy protection and data retention, pushing organisations to make new and old data more readily available.

Virtualisation: lower cost and accelerated recovery

One of the key benefits brought by virtualisation technology is additional flexibility and cost savings in disaster recovery.
Five years ago, the only way to quickly recover a mission-critical machine to another location required the purchase or lease of identical hardware, which was a costly endeavour. Now, an identical virtual machine sitting at the same remote location costs a fraction as much to lease or own, and to maintain. Creating such a machine can be done in minutes using automation tools that allow users to deploy multiple virtual servers simultaneously.

Two of the most versatile recovery options in the virtual environment are active restore and instant restore. Active restore makes it possible to recover a failed server in seconds, while its data is loaded from the backup in a transparent process. And instant restore enables an instant recovery with a standby virtual machine that can be launched immediately if a physical or virtual machine fails.

Your choice of a backup and recovery solution can determine how easy it is to recover from a server failure. Some virtual machine platforms provide the option of using their own backup and recovery software; some third-party solutions allow users to manage a specific virtual platform - for instance, VMware - and physical platforms, but they don’t support any or all of the other platforms.

With more companies running a mixture of physical and virtual platforms on an ongoing or transitional basis, comprehensive recovery can be very difficult to complete in a timely fashion, making it harder to set and achieve recovery time objectives.

To assure faster disk image-based recovery of all systems - whether virtual or physical - look for a backup and recovery solution that manages both physical and virtual machines and supports all major virtual platforms in an identical manner, from a single interface. This will allow you to build one disaster recovery plan rather than two or more.

Flexible cloud-based recovery infrastructures and their impact

As cloud-based recovery infrastructures mature, we believe the coming convergence of disk image-based backup technologies, server virtualisation and flexible cloud-based recovery infrastructures can be used to speed up recovery.
The extensive adoption of virtualisation occurring today can be combined with cloud-based services and more sophisticated disaster recovery services to give small and medium-sized businesses access to fast disaster recovery that until now has been the sole province of larger organisations.

In fact, the tight integration of cloud hosting capabilities and the most advanced disaster recovery software is right around the corner. When combined, organisations will find it easier and ultimately less expensive to protect information at the data centre and remote locations, with all processes controllable from a centralised management console.

While taking inventory of existing disaster recovery infrastructure, take advantage of the disaster recovery planning functions available in the latest round of backup and recovery products. Search for solutions that allow you to harness the power of wizard-driven interfaces to survey the server and workstation environment and create highly automated backup schedules. Today’s advanced interfaces make it possible even for less seasoned IT personnel to create a professional, bulletproof recovery regime that companies can stake their futures on.

By Simon Howe, Country Manager, ANZ, at Acronis. Acronis is a provider of easy-to-use backup, recovery and security solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments.