Category: Inmage

A few years ago an article appeared on TechTarget’s SearchDataManagement site that examined the top 10 reasons that disaster recovery plans fail. Granted, that article is over three years old but the points that the author makes are just as valid now as they were then even though from a technology perspective a lot has changed.

The analogy that business continuity software is a lot like automobile insurance is a valid comparison to make. Companies buy business continuity software for the same reasons that they buy automobile insurance: protection against unexpected loss. In fact, most companies cannot fathom NOT buying automobile insurance since if their employees are driving company vehicles and are involved in some type of wreak it presents an incalculable and unforeseen financial risk to the company’s bottom line. It is for the same reason that companies buy business continuity software for their corporate applications – they need similar levels of assurance that their data is protected and is readily available in the event that they have to bring their applications back online should a man-made or natural disaster occur.

Most enterprise companies share one thing in common: they are most comfortable doing business with other enterprise companies. Buying from other enterprise companies gives the purchasing company some level of confidence that, after they make the acquisition, the other company will be around to provide support for the product. It is only when the costs of purchasing technology from another enterprise company are so outrageous, and do not come with similar assurances of success, that sometimes one has to innovate.

Organizations do not like to think about business continuity for some very simple reasons: it’s costly, it’s complex and it exposes to companies just how vulnerable they really are should a disaster occur. So companies tend to live in denial about implementing a business continuity solution until some triggering event occurs that makes them have to deal with the problem head on.

Microsoft SharePoint presents a particularly vexing problem to companies in terms of data protection. A single instance of SharePoint, that keeps all of a company’s documents or files in a single Microsoft SQL Server database, may potentially be satisfactorily backed up using existing SQL Server data protection tools. However, if companies start to store data on external storage devices or as the number of SharePoint instances in a company begins to grow, the complexity associated with protecting SharePoint increases significantly.

At the turn of the millennium, email in general and Microsoft Exchange specifically became the must-have corporate application. Today businesses cannot imagine how they ever functioned without Exchange as it has become the most mission critical application in most organizations. Now that same experience is again repeating itself as companies come to understand the power of Microsoft SharePoint and what it means in terms of improved productivity for their employees. The bad news is that as more companies adopt SharePoint as a key application, they are encountering the same problems protecting and recovering SharePoint data that they used to encounter with Exchange.

The requirements for providing higher, faster and easier means of enterprise business continuity have escalated dramatically in the last decade while the criteria for selecting the software remains rooted in yesterday’s premises and assumptions. Today’s corporations not only need to re-evaluate what software they are using to perform these tasks but even what criteria on which they should base these decisions. The last six criteria covered in this blog entry provide readers a list of base line features that they should look for when picking backup continuity software and how well InMage Systems delivers on meeting these new requirements for enterprise distributed business continuity.

The pressures to implement business continuity software that can span the enterprise and recover application servers grow with each passing day. Disasters come in every form and shape from regional disasters (earthquakes, floods, lightning strikes) to terrorist attacks to brown-outs to someone accidently unplugging the wrong server. Adding to the complexity, the number of application servers and virtual machines are on the rise and IT headcounts are flat or shrinking. Despite these real-world situations, companies often still buy business continuity software that is based on centralized or stand-alone computing models that everyone started abandoning over a decade ago.

Any type of business continuity software that a company uses has a catch: the first task after the software is installed is to create a full copy of the production data at the disaster recovery (DR) site. What options the business continuity software provides to copy the data to the DR site is of a primary concern to businesses since it impacts what data is copied, how much data is copied and what type of planning companies have to do ahead of time.