Data is too important nowadays to lose. When an unexpected disaster hits, you’ll quickly realise that you don’t just need robust backup but also highly reliable recovery capabilities to ensure minimal disruptions to your operations – just in case anything untoward happens, as in a breach or a force majeure.
Veeam®’s “Data Protection Trends Report 2022” bears out this emerging need. In the report, business decision-makers identified two factors that would compel them to change their primary backup solution. And these factors unsurprisingly involve reliability: The first is to improve Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the second is to improve actual reliability.
Source: Veeam
Short of actually changing your backup solution, you can improve recovery reliability by incorporating these three strategies into your existing solution:
- Perform constant 24/7/365 monitoring. Constant monitoring helps ensure your backups are always completed with no errors that can compromise the integrity of your data.
- Monitor your backup infrastructure. Issues in infrastructure can compromise the overall reliability of your backup solution. Monitoring for common issues lets you spot and address them immediately. In doing so, you can minimise the chances of infrastructure issues potentially affecting the success of your backups.
- Analyse usage trends. A common issue that compromises recovery reliability is overshooting your backup storage capacity—meaning, you are backing up more than what your backup can store. You can prevent this by analysing usage trends, which you can do using different tools to size your backup storage capacity.
Of course, switching to Veeam certainly would not hurt. In fact, doing so might be the best decision you will make to ensure reliable backups. Veeam’s reputation in backup and recovery precedes it, staying true to its mantra of being simple, flexible and always reliable. And its 3-2-1-1-0 Rule is even an upgrade over the industry standard 3-2-1 Rule. It might also be the standard soon as it helps ensure reliable recovery for the many types of incidents that can compromise your data.
Source: Veeam
Critically, Veeam offers five major ways to achieve your recovery goals and improve reliability. These are as follows:
- Monitoring and Analytics. As discussed, monitoring and analysis are critical because they can let you nip issues in the bud—long before they can cause problems and decrease recovery reliability. Veeam’s features in this regard include the following:
- Proactive Alerting to stay alert and mitigate issues immediately.
- Smart Reporting for informed decision making.
- Intelligent Diagnostics for proactive issue resolutions.
- Remediation Actions for automated, self-healing policy-based fixes to problems.
- Immutability for Backups. Immutability keeps your backup data from being changed or altered, which is crucial now given the rise of ransomware that also targets backups. Veeam offers a hardened repository that writes your backups in an immutable state—meaning, when it is restored, it is 100% reliable.
- Keeping Things Clean. This simply means keeping cyber threats out by using antivirus and malware solutions. Doing so keeps backups clean and reliable as they are being written. Veeam SecureRestore, in particular, ensures that no cyber threats are introduced during recovery.
- Recovery Testing and Verification. What gets measured gets done. Regularly checking and verifying your backups lets you make sure that your backups are reliable and error-free—that they will power back on and that they will, indeed, come back. To this end, Veeam allows isolated testing that enables assessment in a safe environment. It can also automate the process with built-in automation and Veeam SureBackup for automatic verification.
- Flexibility. With Veeam, you can choose your own recovery depending on your needs or preference. You can choose from the following:
- Instant VM Recovery.
- Instant Recovery for databases.
- Instant Recovery for NAS.
- Continuous Data Protection.
- Recover to Anything Virtual (recover to vSphere, Hyper-V or Nutanix AHV).
Not to belabour a point but data is extremely important in this data-driven, digital-first world. Unfortunately, your data is always at risk of being compromised. This is why reliable data backup and recovery is now a necessity. The good thing is that you can ensure it if you want to.
Read our interactive Special Focus Feature to learn more about how Veeam can provide you with the reliability you need to protect your data in today’s complex IT environments.
