Regardless the size of your organization, if you don’t have a solid backup and recovery IT system in place, your business is at risk.

When disaster renders your data inaccessible, it isn’t cheap. The current average cost of disaster-related downtime runs $138,000 per hour as reported by Aberdeen Group from a recent survey of small, midsize, and large enterprises. And since most companies experience some amount of system downtime each year, those costs can add up quickly.

Getting your servers and data up and running quickly is imperative. But is your backup and recovery technology outdated, making what could take hours more like days (or even weeks) to full recovery? If this is your situation, take a look at how today’s technology enables enterprises of all sizes to dramatically reduce data risk.

If you’re not sure what to look for when shopping for a new backup and disaster recovery solution, the Key Elements of a Successful Disaster Recovery Strategy: Virtual and Physical eBook from AppAssure will help. In it, they recommend four key capabilities and five features to look for in a disaster recovery solution. Here is a summary from the eBook.

Four Key Capabilities for a Disaster Recovery Solution

The key business-level capabilities that a modern disaster recovery solution should have are:

• Push-button failover – For both virtual and physical servers, see that you can have immediate recovery from any system outage at the push of a button though a console.

• Bare-metal recovery – Eliminate the expensive and difficult “requirement” of having the exact same hardware ready to receive the restore; rather, restore your servers on any available hardware.

• Integrated data replication – Back up your data off-site using today’s best practice of replicating a copy of backup data over the network to a remote location or cloud provider.

• Easy off-site recovery – Whether you’re replicating your data to off-site backup servers or to the cloud, when recovery is needed, simply click to copy the data back to your site.

Five Features to Look for in a Disaster Recovery Solution

To achieve the four capabilities listed above, the disaster recovery solution you are considering should have these specific features:

• Push-button failover for physical and virtual machines – Look for solutions offering an automated, push-button failover capability that can deploy servers to any available virtual host.

• Push-button disaster recovery testing – Look for solutions with this feature that enables production servers to continue running unaffected.

• Bare-metal server recovery – Look for solutions that can restore backup images anywhere – virtual, physical, or cloud.

• Mountable server snapshots – Look for solutions that natively mount and deliver access to data inside backup images, which provide a direct approach for getting data out of any production application.

• Off-site backup replication – Look for solutions that efficiently compress, deduplicate, and replicate your backup data, in both directions, and to the wide range of off-site storage options.

Your backup and disaster recovery solution can and should deliver on these features and capabilities. Download Key Elements of a Successful Disaster Recovery Strategy: Virtual and Physical (no registration required) to learn more.

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