Every business faces an ever-widening range of business continuity challenges, and virtualization is generally considered a great step toward improving an organization's ability to recover from a business threat. But while businesses recognize and acknowledge the need for a business continuity plan, there are challenges to executing it successfully in a virtual environment. Taking hours or days to recover from a VMware backup or a Hyper-V backup is no longer an acceptable part of a business continuity plan.

Recovery time objectives and application availability may fall short. It can be hard to meet the increasingly short recovery time objectives most companies set for themselves. With so many employees working on mission-critical server-based projects and with partners and customers who depend on outward-facing applications, you need guaranteed fast and accurate recoveries to compete effectively.

Budgets are stretched. Business continuity is hard to achieve for many small and medium-sized companies using outmoded approaches like building a dedicated offsite server and storage infrastructure. Such a solution falls outside the budget scope of all but the most well-endowed companies because IT staffs can no longer afford to purchase servers and communication services that won't be used very frequently. Fortunately that approach is no longer necessary with the advent of hosted offsite services.

Business continuity can be complex to build, maintain. Management of a business continuity program can be a headache if a long learning curve is required. If it involves lots of training manual testing of recoveries, the administrative overhead involved may be unsustainable.

But it's not all bad news. Administrators of virtual infrastructures have an increasing number of affordable options available them to deliver high levels of continuity, without costing a great deal of money or requiring a lot of administrative effort. And recoveries can be far more flexible. For instance, physical machines can quickly be imaged and recovered to virtual machines; virtual production machines can be recovered to other virtual machines or from one virtual platform to another. Even virtual-to-physical machine recoveries can be carried out if necessary. 

Many of the manual steps associated with traditional recoveries are dependent on the use of image technology to carry out a VMware backup or Hyper-V backup.  When image-level backups are properly harnessed into a well-constructed business continuity plan, they provide the key to reducing recoveries from hours to minutes. Now, virtual environments can deliver rapid, cost-efficient business continuity that promises to cut downtime for any mission-critical application and ensures that it will be fully protected.

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