Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

It's easy to imagine any number of disasters that could create a catastrophic data-loss scenario. It’s not a matter of if – but when. With employees unable to access data and maintain productivity, every second that passes is lost revenue.

Disaster Recovery (DR) is your process of restoring business functionality and regaining access to data. It is a critically important part of your overall security strategy that should be carefully planned and documented in advance. Often a full restoration takes both time and resources, meaning that DR does not necessarily provide business continuity. Business Continuity is your ability to continue business operations at a satisfactory level at all times, even when disaster strikes. Other technologies must often play important roles while Disaster Recovery processes work to reach recovery time (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). This might include online services such as Dropbox, cloud-hosted software, or even some form of virtualization.

Enhancing Business Continuity with VHDX

Imagine your application server suffers a critical hardware failure, leaving employees in a lurch. Fortunately, you have a DR plan in place, and data is in the process of being restored to a new server. But employees need not wait around discussing it by the water cooler, because a Virtual Machine duplicate of the Server was quickly booted and made available to ensure an uninterrupted workflow. In fact, most employees were blissfully unaware that any disruption ever took place. 

Many small businesses might feel they don’t have the resources for a comprehensive Business Continuity solution, but this isn't true. Often adding resources to improve continuity can be done with minimal investment. In fact, some virtualization capabilities may already be included inside your backup software. In the case of NovaBACKUP, a VHDX System Image (Hyper-V Virtual Hard Disk) backup is easily created and booted as a virtual machine in just a few simple steps. Admins can rely on the fact that business continues and mission-critical processes are supported, even while their Disaster Recovery images are rebuilding.

Taking redundancy even further, disaster recovery (and virtual machine images) are best copied and hosted offsite to guard against local disasters. The Buffalo WSS TeraStation is one affordable example of a network storage device that can quickly add numerous enhancements to your BCDR (business continuity disaster recovery) plan.

Using NovaBACKUP software on a Buffalo NAS device supports BCDR with many advantages:

Added Security: Easily back up virtual machine images to a remote location for fast access during emergency scenarios. Even replicate to other locations for redundancy and to isolate system images from local effects.

Flexibility: Windows server products like this can incorporate any supported cloud product you’re using. Should your business strategy change, you can choose a different cloud provider, or even incorporate NovaBACKUP cloud services.

Efficiency: Rather than using different solutions for local backup, image backup, and cloud backup, NovaBACKUP software on Buffalo storage devices provides an all-in-one hybrid solution that can accomplish all of this with VHDX / virtualization functionality for added business continuity considerations.

Guaranteed Access: Not every traditional Disaster Recovery process is a success. Virtualization technology eliminates numerous hardware dependencies so that business moves forward regardless of the disaster recovery status.

Reduced Cost: Virtual machines are recoverable via any hardware, further reducing the cost of server infrastructure for recovery. Buffalo devices support the "S" in SMB, without recurring costs and without requiring the use of any specific cloud.

Every small business should have a disaster recovery strategy and plan in place. But an organization's ability to continue unhindered through a disaster incident shouldn’t hang upon the success of a Disaster Recovery restoration alone.  Administrators need multiple technologies to turn to during a crisis. At a cost-effective price point, a professional BCDR solution can be created that offers multiple types of backup,  image restore and cloud options can be achieved. Our teams are here to identify your exact requirements.

Speak with a NovaBACKUP expert, or a Buffalo storage team member today. Want to learn more? Watch a recent NovaBACKUP-Buffalo webinar below:

WEBINAR: How to Simplify Backup and Disaster Recovery BDR with NovaBACKUP and Buffalo Americas