Backup Solutions Overview

Backups are arguably the most important process in your IT organization, but not surprisingly, they are also the tasks most likely to be neglected. The reason is that data is fragmented across the enterprise, and is growing in leaps and bounds every day, making for a very difficult proposition. With several years of experience in helping our customers to formulate and implement backup strategies, we can help you to devise a backup strategy with the following key considerations in mind:

• Consolidation : Where does your organization’s information lie?
• Capacity : How much of data do you need to be backed up?
• Backup Window : How much of time do you have to backup your data without affecting daily business operations?
• Frequency : How frequently does your data need to be backed up?
• Verification : Once you have backed up your data, are you able to verify that the backup really exists on tape?
• Recovery strategy : How do you hit the ground running after a disaster?

Availability & Business Continuity Solutions Overview

Your business continuously depends on its critical information to do business. However, ever evolving
compliance, governance and risk challenges, business operations and the constant drive toward greater efficiency all amplify the challenges of information protection and recovery. We can provide you with solutions that automate, integrate and simplify your organization's entire disaster recovery (DR) life cycle, from testing through deployment and refinement to real-time operational management. It is essential to have a solution from a vendor that understands your challenges and requirements, and this is exactly where we can come in and deliver value.

One key to managing unforeseen events is having a well-documented business continuity plan. This plan identifies the potential impact of unfavorable events, formulates feasible continuity strategies, and develops the processes to put in place to eliminate unacceptable risk.

The business continuity plan should address the following issues:

• What are the primary objectives of the organization?
• What is the schedule for achieving these objectives?
• Who are the individual and group contributors, and what are their roles?
• Which contributors can provide both internal and external support?
• What are the deliverables?
• How are the deliverables measured and delivered?

To help prepare answers to these questions, many organizations use the concepts of Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

Recovery Time Objectives And Recovery Point Objectives

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the duration between failure and functional recovery. An RTO value specifies the maximum length of time an organization can wait after a disruption for an alternate disaster recovery site to become operational. For example, if an event takes an application out of service, and the application has an RTO of one week, the organization can wait a week before the application becomes available at another site.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the amount of data loss that can be tolerated by a business. The RPO specifies the maximum amount of time at the primary site for which work can be lost. Lost work is work that cannot be recovered at the alternate site after a data transfer occurs. For example, if an event takes an application out of service, and the application has an RPO of two days, the organization can withstand a loss of two days' processing before the application becomes available again at another site.

Different functional organizations and business units in an enterprise require different RTO and RPO measures to translate the business needs for availability and security of data into IT investments. These investments will vary based on business requirements.

Business Benefits

The right set of people, processes, and technologies, along with constant analysis, actionable intelligence, agile remediation, and proactive vigilance is necessary to build a resilient infrastructure. By taking the appropriate measures, you can ensure the rapid recovery of systems should any disruptions occur. By proactively reducing the likelihood of disruptions, you can preserve the continuity of services and applications that are absolutely critical to the success and growth of your business. And that, of course, brings major benefits to your IT organization and your company as a whole:

• Maximize system uptime, proactively prevent downtime, and minimize the impact and cost of disruptions
• Set and maintain robust and scalable Service Level Agreements for mission-critical systems and applications
• Protect sensitive information assets while increasing their availability
• Sustain, streamline, and optimize the efficiency of business
• Address standards and regulatory compliance requirements
• Improve enterprise agility, increase business productivity, and expand service capabilities
• Enhance customer service and strengthen partner relationships via greater uptime and improved performance of networked services
• Add value to the overall business in terms of brand reputation, competitive advantage, and investor confidence by improving the integrity of the company’s assets and systems