Big or small, Enterprise or SMB -- if you don’t have a solid backup and recovery system in place, your IT and business is at risk.  And when disaster strikes, it usually won't be cheap.

In fact, a recent survey from Aberdeen Group found the average cost of a disaster-related downtime will run you around $138,000 per hour!  So getting things back up and running as quickly as possible is imperative to the bottom line.

If you aren't sure what you need in a new backup and disaster recovery solution, check out the Key Elements of a Successful Disaster Recovery Strategy: Virtual and Physical eBook from AppAssure and written by Microsoft MVP and VMware vExpert Greg Shields.  It  recommends four key capabilities and five features to look for in a disaster recovery solution.

 

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.

 

Download Key Elements of a Successful Disaster Recovery Strategy: Virtual and Physical to learn more.