Top tips for cost-efficient backup and disaster recovery

By Bill Taylor-Mountford, President, Acronis, APAC | Oct 18, 2011

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The unrelenting series of floods threatening various parts of Thailand has proven the value of backing up critical business data. It is vitally important to be able to maintain continuity and customer service in the wake of a natural disaster.

According to a recent survey by Acronis1, more than half of local businesses (55%) felt that they would not be able to recover quickly in the event of a downtime. And only 54% of Asian businesses believed their backup and disaster recovery are well managed.  

For the 2.89 million small and medium-sized businesses in Thailand, it is essential for them to look into a comprehensive backup and recovery plan that will help them to minimize the financial and productivity impacts that occur during and after the flood.

Acronis offers five tips to help businesses ensure their data and systems are fully protected and can be recovered quickly in the event of a natural disaster.

1. Opt into disk imaging. If you’re still depending on file- and folder-level backups, you’re missing an opportunity to cut your server and workstation backup times dramatically. The best disk imaging solutions feature “hot” or “live” backups, which don’t require you to shut down a mission-critical machine even for a moment in order to back it up.

And when it comes to recoveries, the advantages of disk imaging pile up. You’ll:

• Recover Flexibly. You can choose to recover just a file or folder, or an entire workstation or server, from your disk-image-based backup.
• Recover Faster. Disk imaging allows you to measure recovery times in minutes rather than hours or days by eliminating the painful, time-consuming bare-metal restore of the OS, applications and settings before you can restore the data. If you’re virtualizing your servers, you can cut recoveries of your most mission critical machines to zero minutes using a recently developed instant restore technology.

2. Use an all-in-one backup solution for hybrid physical/virtual environments. The percentage of installed applications running in a virtual environment will more than double from 23% in 2010 to 48% by 2012, according to an analyst statement in March 2010 at the Gartner IT Infrastructure Operations and Management Summit. Organizations often adopt whatever unique backup and recovery scheme is associated with each type of virtual machine platform they’re using. This can create a silo effect, where you have three and sometimes four separate virtual and physical backup schemes to manage. The best practice alternative? Use a backup and recovery solution that takes care of backups and recoveries of all your machines – both physical and virtual, Windows and Linux – through a single pane of management glass.

If you have more than one type of VM, look for 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.

3. Jump to the cloud for business continuity. Onsite backups are great for day-to-day protection, but if they are destroyed, an untested off-site data storage solution probably won’t give you the protection you need in an emergency. That’s where cloud infrastructure as a service offerings come in. CloudBzz, which tracks cloud computing worldwide, says the market for cloud services was expected to reach $10.5 billion in 2010, billowing to $34.1 billion in 2014. [http://www.cloudbzz.com, June 22, 2010]. New services allow you to move to the cloud incrementally based on how critical each application is to your business.

The first meaningful improvement you can make is to back up in the cloud and recover back to any location from it. Look for a solution that backs up complete system images along with files and folders. This can save you the trouble of hours-long bare-metal rebuilds. The second meaningful step is to contract with a cloud services provider to not only back up to the cloud, but to recover in the cloud on virtual machines. This can be done surprisingly inexpensively if you choose a service that allows you to leave your virtual machines in standby mode until they’re needed.

4. Recover to dissimilar hardware. Not long ago, you had two choices for a recovery if a machine failed. The first – maintaining an identical machine – was expensive, and not a lot of organizations bothered. Instead they chose to build the machine from bare metal, beginning with the operating system, and followed by applications and settings. This choice guaranteed an hours-long recovery, and it’s surprising that so many organizations continue to recover machines in this manner.

A better choice is to recover to dissimilar hardware, and this can include any decommissioned machine you might have at hand. 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. In either case, you eliminate the need for expensive duplicate spares and time-consuming bare-metal rebuilds.

5. Automate everything you can. It’s easy to forget about backups, but if they’re already completely automated, that’s a good thing. Backup systems that require a lot of day-to-day administration eat up time and introduce the potential for human error. The more automated your backup scheme, the more time you can devote to proactive work. Look for highly intuitive interfaces that don’t constantly require you to refer to the user manual. Look for time-saving processes like policy grouping to assign identical backup schedules across similar machines.

6. Reduce your data storage requirements. Data deduplication and file compression utilities provide proven and inexpensive ways to roll back disk storage requirements by 70% and more and they reduce network traffic because you’re moving less data around. They pay for themselves quickly and promote long-term reductions in storage purchases. And when they’re integrated with your backup and recovery software, they require little or no attention.