‘Be prepared,’ is a common statement, but far too often companies don’t heed this advice in advance and end up facing serious consequences in the wake of a disaster. Eighty-three percent of IT professionals said in the event of data loss, their companies have no disaster recovery plan or they lack total confidence in what’s in place, according to Vision Solutions’ 6th annual State of Resilience Report. When disaster does strike, then, such companies face major loss of time, money and most importantly sensitive data. But with knowledge of software-based, byte-level replication, organizations can change the way they perceive high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR).
Part of being prepared is not waiting until a catastrophe strikes to ask, ‘now what?’ Companies must plan for a number of outcomes before they happen by implementing the correct real-time replication solutions beforehand. Yet more than 80 percent of companies still rely on tape backup and offsite storage, even though tape delivers slower recovery times amid greater operational complexity. By implementing software solutions, diversifying infrastructure to prevent single point-of-failure scenarios and planning for regular system testing, companies can ensure that their business-critical data will be protected no matter what comes their way.
If you want to truly recover your environment, you don’t want to lose any data—it doesn’t make sense to say, “I have 99 percent of my data, so I’m good.” It’s got to be 100 percent, so companies need to be 100 percent protected. Even one fragment of missing data could lead to a huge financial cost, provoke a lawsuit or, in the case of a large retailer create damaging gaps in knowledge of customers’ transactional data.
About Vision Solutions
Vision Solutions is the premier provider of software solutions designed to protect data, minimize downtime and maximize resources for the modern data center. We are the only company to deliver workload migrations, high availability, disaster recovery and data sharing – across multiple operating systems, on any hardware and on any physical, virtual or Cloud-based environment. Our solutions perform zero downtime migration of data, applications and systems. We utilize real-time replication to prevent data loss. And our software enables different database platforms to seamlessly share and consolidate data in real-time. Vision Solutions has been serving enterprises and managed service providers for over 25 years.
Organizations that use real-time byte-level replication can simply switch over to an identical environment and pick up where the first one failed. The solution works faster than traditional methods because it doesn’t repetitively capture all the data with each snapshot. It only updates what’s new, building a comprehensive record of every byte, so companies can be up and running quickly with their data intact. This option ensures that every bit of data is protected and retrievable, regardless of the challenge, on any platform, in any combination of physical, virtual or cloud servers.
On the other hand, traditional recovery strategies rely on snapshots to preserve data—but the data is only as good as the latest snapshot. A retail business, for example, may collect thousands of transactions over the course of a day. Hospitals accumulate patient records second by second that are used to make life or death decisions. If a server crashes, it could lose all of the organization’s most recent data.
Nearly 40 percent of companies said they’ve experienced data loss due to disaster, server failure, application failure or human error, the survey reported. The damage was significant—almost half of those respondents had lost a day or more of data.
Because of the complexity of data centers today, given the amount of data available from business development and with increasing options for acquiring data, it is imperative to have an HA/DR solution that is flexible enough to run across any platform, operating system or environment—not just from like system, so that your solutions for data protection can grow and evolve as your company does. With companies’ data requirements becoming only more demanding moving forward, solutions need to be implemented in a straightforward way that’s tailored to the company’s operations—large or small. Being confident that the data is continually protected in any scenario or within any environment is a necessity for business stability.
Business demands that the solutions coexist with the company’s environment and have total awareness of what’s going on. When they detect a problem, they know where the organization lost its operating system or server and have already captured the most recent information. Recovery can begin the second they move to another environment.
Real-time replication solutions are now proven in the marketplace, having demonstrated how it makes data protection less complicated. Fifty-three percent of companies had implemented the solution by 2013, up from 35 percent in 2013, according to the Vision survey.
With the right solution in place, disaster recovery actually becomes quite simple.
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