When Disaster Strikes

According to data center experts, as many as 90 percent of smaller organizations do not have an adequate disaster recovery (DR) plan in place. Fortunately, a number of backup and recovery options are available to protect systems and data.

Thanks to new technologies, smaller organizations now have access to sophisticated, comprehensive DR options, such as ability to fail over to another data center rapidly or closely aligning replication processes. Some DR providers, for example, can license per virtual machine (VM), so replicating a VM is both inexpensive and easy. If disaster strikes, an administrator simply clicks to a new data center.

Regarding backup, IT departments can now afford enterprise-scale backup software thanks to virtualization. These solutions, which backup VMs, are priced on a per-socket basis. Some offerings build everything needed for backup into a single operating system, making it a simple process.

Many major cloud services providers also offer complete backup as a service and disaster recovery as a service packages. Backup as a service offers protect copies of files and applications through the provider. Although similar, disaster recovery as a service packages ensure IT organizations can rapidly recover not only the files but also the machines after a disaster. Both of these services are popular among both government and commercial IT organizations.

Read the CDW white paper “Keeping Pace with Data Center Evolution” to learn more about disaster recovery options.