Digital Transformation: A guide to choosing and adopting a modern backup and recovery solution

If your organisation, like most, has digital transformation on the agenda, then it’s critical to include a re-assessment of your data availability, backup and recovery strategies. With an avalanche of data inundating every digitally-minded business, you need secure, assured ways to safely store and access all this data. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Without easy access to data, entire organisations can come crumbling down. Look at any modern manufacturing company. One could easily – and mistakenly – presume that manufacturing is immune to data dependency. Yet think about the vast amounts of data moving between a manufacturer’s R&D arm, its customer-facing arm, engineering, sales, marketing, and more.

Data downtime in any of these areas could affect all others, causing financial loss, reputational damage and more.

Now imagine the impact if you were a telecommunications company? Or a finance company? Not only do these organisations need real-time access to data to deliver the level of customer service expected of today’s digital natives, but they also need to comply with strict regulations around data protection and security.

It’s clear that any digital transformation journey needs watertight backup and recovery solutions that enable 24/7/365 access to mission-critical data.

6 things to look for in a modern backup and recovery solution

1. Data loss avoidance

Make sure the solution supports end-to-end encryption of data at the point of origination. It should also support multiple backup options – including the ability to perform backup and replication at the same time, and to replicate on-site for high availability or off-site for disaster recovery.

2. Capacity planning and forecasting

An intelligent solution will enable you to model scenarios and receive alerts when resources are close to capacity, helping you to flex your backup volumes as required.

3. Automated test recovery processes

Testing the ability that your solution can recover data in a timeframe that’s acceptable to your business is critical. These tests need to be done regularly – and, given the impracticality of manually checking every recovery job, automation is essential.

4. Scalability

Your solution should have the ability to grow with your business, as your customer base grows and if/when you branch into global markets.

5. Future proofing

Your solution should able to protect a variety of workloads, including both physical and virtual, tape and disk, on-premises and cloud, traditional and hyper-converged, SQL and Oracle, Windows and Linux, AWS and Azure.

6. It should just work

Keep it simple. A complex availability solution is only going to make it more difficult to restore in a timely manner, that is if you can restore at all.

To learn more about business continuity, Veeam and how it could work within your organisation, get in touch today.