Acronis Provides Disaster Recovery Tips For Businesses

Acronis Provides Disaster Recovery Tips For Businesses In The Wake Of This Year's Floods, Fires And Quakes

Tips for effective IT disaster recovery that can help businesses protect their data and recover quickly from natural disasters

Sydney and Auckland, 5 July 2011 - This year's unrelenting series of cyclones, floods, bushfires and earthquakes across Australia and New Zealand has proven the value of backing up critical business data. It is vitally important to be able to maintain continuity and customer service in the wake of a natural disaster.

According to a recent survey by Acronis1, just 22 percent of Australian businesses felt that they would be able to recover quickly in the event of downtime, compared to a global average of 50 percent. And, a further concern is that a third of local businesses (36%) do not have a backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategy in place.

Until recently, the ultimate solution to avoid significant disaster was to build an offsite disaster recovery centre, with an ultra-high-speed link to the DR facility and provisioned with duplicate computing equipment and added staff.

Fortunately for small and medium-size businesses, it is now easier to achieve the same level of data protection enjoyed by large organisations with the advent of the latest imaging, virtualisation and Cloud services.

Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use DR and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, offers five tips to help businesses ensure their data and systems are fully protected and can be recovered quickly in the event of a natural disaster.

1. Opt into disk imaging. To ensure your company can be up and running quickly after a disaster, make images of computers and servers so full copies of data and applications are safely tucked away. You can either store on different machines, in different locations or reach for a cloud solution. In the event that something happens, the images can be loaded onto to new hardware in hours rather than days.

1. Jump to the cloud for business continuity. Onsite backups are great for day-to-day recovery, but if they are destroyed too, you need to consider an off-site data storage solution. An alternative is to contract with a cloud service provider to not only back up to the cloud but also recover onto virtual machines.

1. Recover to dissimilar hardware. Hardware-agnostic software can recover from the backup image of the failed system onto any available hardware and replace the old machine's hardware drivers with the new ones, a process that takes only about 15 minutes. Virtualisation users can opt to recover mission-critical machines even more quickly by recovering either a physical or virtual machine disk image to a standby virtual machine. It can then be launched immediately with a mouse click.

1. Include both your physical and virtual environments. Use a backup and recovery solution that takes care of backups and recoveries of all your machines. For ease of management consider a solution that protects all the platforms you're using. Then, if disaster strikes, your organisation can much more easily coordinate a recovery that will minimise or eliminate the potential for lost productivity.

1. Make a plan and follow it. Make sure if disaster does strike, you know how to get your data back quickly. Look for data protection and disaster recovery solutions that provide a step by step guide to recover your systems and files. It is rare that the person who made the backup is the same person on hand to recover the system.

Karl Sice, General Manager, Pacific, Acronis said: "Any data loss, through natural disaster or simple human mistake, can spell failure for businesses. Our tips can help businesses, small and large, develop comprehensive backup and recovery plans that minimise the financial and productivity impacts that occur after unplanned disruptions.

Acronis provides backup and recovery software that helps small and large businesses ensure not only the preservation of digital assets, but also the rapid recovery of those assets after the storm has passed. For more information, go to www.acronis.com.au

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