Managing backups may be routine and straightforward when the entire gamut of operations takes place within a single facility. However, for national corporations and global enterprises with offices across the globe, and each office having disparate systems and procedures, deploying an integrated backup and disaster recovery system to ensure that the company’s digital assets are safe, secure and accessible, remains a big challenge.
The challenge of performing backups from remote locations is multidimensional, which includes logistical, technological and financial considerations.
Infrastructure Logistics
The biggest challenge is logistics. Most enterprises invest in local servers, storage and networking to provide IT capabilities to their branch offices. While this may fulfill business requirements, supporting the infrastructure is a big challenge. Many branches rely on their staff to operate the backup tapes, or may have to ship the hard drives physically to a data center. With more pressing things to do, these tasks are often put on the backburner or even skipped altogether. Bandwidth and latency issues may make real-time remote backups impossible, and, even when it is possible, the high costs are hard to swallow. Less than optimum backup cycles produce data inconsistencies, which greatly affect business processes.
Managing Complex Environments
Another primary challenge relates to the data. Aggregating data from different locations usually means terabytes of data and millions of files. The problem is compounded by the data being a mixture of unstructured data ranging from Oracle databases to graphics files, and from Word documents to unrecognizable file formats. Many backup solutions may leave some data unprotected as they try to navigate the labyrinth of files.
Organizing all these files without disrupting operations remains a big challenge. Additional locations add layers of costs and complexity to the backup solutions. Backups of huge volumes can be time-consuming as well, resulting in large downtimes. It also makes restores time-consuming and onerous.
Understand Data Growth
Another related challenge is system capacity. The capacity requirements increase with each backup and, most of the time, several distinct components require frequent updates.
Plan for Disaster Recovery
Finally, even when the backup component is addressed, the disaster recovery component is ignored. Many offshore locations are situated in diverse and often hazardous environmental conditions. Unreliable electricity grids, earthquakes, floods, fires or tsunamis may be all too common, depending on the location. Disaster recovery has to be a priority for your organization and the locations in which you store your data.
The STORServer Enterprise Backup Appliance offers a sound, robust, automated, and fully scalable backup and disaster recovery solution, suitable for enterprises spread over many locations. The system facilitates consolidated backup, archiving and disaster recovery solutions and the ingenious architecture allows the server of one site to act as the disaster-recovery repository for the other sites. Contact us today to learn more.
