Imagine having to piece together a wooden shed after a storm blows it down, but reconstructing it without a blueprint. Still, every shingle on the roof needs to be placed with meticulous precision. Each wooden plank must be flawlessly laid based on pure intuition. The tedious nature of the project would be enough to drive even the most experienced, zen-adept construction experts out of their mind. Not only would it be a waste of time – this painstaking approach would appear downright illogical to any reasonable onlooker.
In need of a vision
It doesn’t make sense for a builder to piece together a structure without a clear picture in mind, and the same concept applies in IT disaster recovery. When it comes to restoring IT assets in the data center and across the network, administrators need to have a rock-solid plan that they can follow when a crisis scenario takes place. This begins with mapping out a strategy, but organizations must ultimately have an automated recovery system in place to expedite restoration and minimize the level of manual user involvement required to achieve recovery point and time objectives.
Automation takes away much of the uncertainty and anxiety that accompanies traditional approaches to disaster recovery. Much like the construction team that requires a blueprint to reconstruct the broken shed, IT administrators can rely on automated features such as virtual machine replication and duplication prevention to ensure they restore systems in their full capacity. When companies employ the support of a dedicated DR provider, internal teams are freed of many additional tasks, allowing them to enjoy the assurance of a service-level agreement.
Dispersed data
Any organization with the technical wherewithal to prioritize disaster recovery is probably well ahead of the game with regard to a multi-site data center architecture. Nowadays, it isn’t rare to see enterprise leaders spread their storage and memory assets over in-house systems, public and private cloud environments, not to mention co-location sites that support satellite office locations and remote users. According to eWEEK, multi-site disaster recovery is the best way to support these diverse asset layouts, backing up storage arrays and OS settings with an endless supply of replicas.
As IT infrastructures become more complex and expansive, disaster recovery solutions will have to keep stride with the quick pace of advancement. Automating DR processes and leveraging the support of expert service providers is the best way to stay ahead of the curve.