Your Backup Strategy Needs More than Backup

Your Backup Process Should Get You Up and Running

You don’t need to have experienced a data loss incident to realize the value of backing up your files. Copying and storing your files ensures you will not lose your information in the event of a catastrophe. Just imagine for a moment that you have an incident that shuts down your business, and you need to go to your archived files to get up and running again. How long will it take to get back to normal? Minutes? Hours? Days? Your backup process and whether or not you have a business continuity plan will determine your answer to that question.

Your Strategy Needs More Than Backup

Having a usable copy of your business data should always be a part of your backup strategy, but you also need a process in place to restore functionality. To do this, you need the applications that use the data. Whether you have simple needs or complex, specialized software applications and sizeable databases, utilizing a virtualization process will diminish the time needed to return to normal business operations. Virtualization creates an image of a server, storage device, network or application and is a fully bootable virtual machine that is immediately available.

Verification and Testing

The best backup strategies include the ability to verify that a backup was successful. Additionally, mock recovery procedures can ensure that the backup is bootable. This is essential to a true business continuity plan because you need to have the capability to recover information and return to business as usual by running the backups as fully-fledged computers.