Your disaster recovery (DR) strategy needs to be revisited and updated every year. It’s better to get it done early than to risk being unprepared if a disaster happens at some point this year (and at least a small one is almost guaranteed). Along with updating your disaster recovery plan to reflect changes in your applications and personnel, you may want to incorporate some new DR tools into your strategy. If you think you’ll benefit from new tools, here are some things to look for.

1. Support for physical, virtual, and cloud servers. Although we’re talking about introducing new tools, the fewer products you have, the easier they are to master. If your new product can protect all your environments, you only need to gain expertise in one tool. It’s also helpful if the tool you choose can integrate with your existing storage infrastructure.
2. Ease of use. Tools with lots of features can be hard to configure properly. Because disaster recovery is so important, because it’s not a function you perform often, and because you need the process to work properly and quickly, a simpler tool with a more streamlined interface can be a better choice. Tools that support more complete automation will also make recovering easier, but recognize that you’ll have to invest the time to develop scripts and configurations.
3. Ability to scale. The demand for data and computing power keeps increasing, so there’s a constant increase in the numbers of servers and storage devices that need protection. Make sure any new product will be able to protect your systems as your business grows over the coming years.
4. Speed of recovery. How rapidly you can recover is the key metric for your recovery strategy. Look for a tool that enables granular recovery down to the file level to get the most flexibility for recovering from small outages fast.
5. Control and security. Cloud-based backup can be an appropriate choice, but it means your backed-up data isn’t completely under your control. Make sure you fully understand how your data is protected in the cloud.
6. Application compatibility. It’s important that backups are application consistent to minimize data loss and ensure the application is recoverable. Verify that the tool you choose works with your most critical applications.
7. Speed of backup. You’ll perform backups far more often than you perform recoveries, and the speed of the backup process can have a significant impact on the availability and performance of your applications.

Prescient Solutions helps companies and organization in Chicago and Schaumburg develop backup and disaster recovery strategies that protect their data and enable rapid restoration of systems. Contact us to learn how our IT consulting and managed services can help you choose and support your backup and disaster recovery tools.