Data is the new currency, and in order to stay competitive businesses must protect it. However, data size and volume are increasing at an unprecedented rate, spawning stricter IT regulations and greater downtime costs for businesses. Outdated backup methods simply can’t keep up with today’s business requirements. Image-based backup is the most innovative, reliable method of safeguarding your business by protecting the critical data on your servers.
While traditional solutions only capture data, image-based backup captures a picture of the entire workstation or server and stores it as a unique point in time. If you need to rebuild or virtualize a machine due to damage or disaster, you can quickly restore all of the files, applications and operating systems. Image-based backup offers other benefits that traditional backup methods can’t:
1.) Faster recovery of entire systems or individual files
Downtime can cost thousands of dollars every minute. In an outage or disaster, seconds count. The faster you can recover, the faster you can get back to taking care of customers and being productive. Image-based backup allows you to recover individual files or entire workstations or servers in the exact state they were at the moment in time you choose. Whether you need to restore a corrupted file or you need to restore an entire branch office, image-based backup gives you the granularity and total protection you need to avoid the devastating consequences of downtime.
2.) Recovery – even to dissimilar hardware or bare metal
If a server is damaged or destroyed, you can’t afford to wait for an exact replica to ship from a warehouse on the opposite coast. Image based backup allows you to restore data, applications and operating systems from the backup server to a new or repaired server of any make and model, including bare metal. This option also allows you to re-purpose and optimize existing infrastructure, take advantage of the most direct path to recovery and even upgrade hardware to whatever best suits your business now and in the future.
3.) Remote Recovery
If you have branch offices and you’re relying on traditional backup methods, you’re putting the entire organization at risk. Either you’re paying for IT staff to travel in order to perform maintenance and backup, or you’re relying on nontechnical staff to perform tasks outside their capabilities. Untrained staff may struggle to consistently perform reliable backups—and failed backups may even go unnoticed until they’re needed. Even if the backup process goes well, it’s likely that untrained staff won’t know how to restore files or full backups after an outage, while failed or faulty backups make bad situations much worse by compounding costly downtime and data loss. Remote recovery enables IT administrators to perform file-level or full-server restorations from geographically dispersed backup servers to new or repaired hardware located anywhere you need them to be.
4.) The ability to manage remote offices from a central location
Managing branch offices can be one of the biggest challenges the IT department faces. It either involves constant travel for IT admins, relying on untrained staff to perform technical tasks or taking risks and living with the same frustrations and inefficiencies that come with having no IT staff at all. The ability to manage remote offices from a central location ensures that all of your locations run as efficiently as your headquarters. With image-based backups, IT staff can maintain the same high standards of backup and recovery for remote and branch offices that they do for the main office.
In this era, data is the lifeblood of a business. If an organization is to remain viable it must provide constant access to the critical data and tools needed to stay productive and competitive. Additionally, the costs and consequences of data loss and downtime due to outages or disasters can cripple a business. Evermore restrictive compliance regulations and service-level agreements make it more important than ever to protect data and access. Though almost every IT organization is being tasked to do more with less, outdated backup methods can’t keep up with today’s business requirements. Where older backup solutions leave an organization open to downtime, data loss and IT inefficiencies, image-based backups protect the business and enable better business continuity— even for branch offices.
There is a solid business case for modernizing your approach to business continuity. Image-based backup provides faster recovery times that protect the organization from the costs and consequences of downtime and data loss; they allow IT administrators to recover individual files or entire servers (including applications and operating systems) to new or dissimilar hardware, including bare metal. Image-based backups also provide the ability to perform local and online backup, giving the organization an extra layer of redundancy while enabling it to take advantage of the benefits of local backup. When it comes to protecting and managing branch and remote offices, image-based backup enables fast, full server recovery and the ability to manage remote offices from a central location. This ability drastically reduces IT costs and ensures that branch offices maintain the same high standards of recoverability as the main office.
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