Five Application Recovery Challenges and How to Address Them
01/08/2012 1:00pm
Business Wire
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In response to such trends as rampant growth of mission-critical data,
the proliferation of virtualization and cloud within the data center,
and the erosion of organizational tolerance for downtime, businesses
large and small are reprioritizing their data
protection objectives. A recent Quest Software survey indicates that
nearly three-quarters of organizations now rank restoring critical
applications alongside recovering lost data as their top data protection
concern. The shift in focus from recovering lost data to restoring
critical applications, however, presents a whole new set of backup and
recovery challenges. Quest Software has identified five
common application recovery challenges, along with best practices for
ensuring the rapid recoverability of these critical assets.
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Five Challenges of Modern Application Recovery and How to Alleviate
Them
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Not all applications are the same – Applications have varying
degrees of value to the business, and must be protected accordingly.
For example, the application powering the finance department’s
transactional database needs to be held to a stricter SLA than an
application less critical to business operations. This means
organizations need to be strategic about setting application recovery
objectives. One-size-fits-all recovery will not suffice.The
Fix: Develop a tiered recovery strategy – If all
applications aren’t the same, then the recovery strategy assigned to
each of those assets shouldn’t be the same, either. Organizations
should align the backup and recovery strategy for a given application
with the criticality of that application to the business. The more
critical the application, the more aggressive the recovery objective
should be.
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Many critical applications are now virtualized – With
virtualization the norm in most of today’s data centers, a growing
number of organizations are virtualizing their mission-critical
applications. Problematically, many traditional backup solutions only
enable image-level backups; so, to recover just a single lost item,
admins must restore the entire VM on which an application is running.The
Fix: Implement application-aware VM backup – Organizations should
make it a priority to use a VM backup solution that’s truly
application-aware and contains a searchable catalog. This will provide
the capability to search for specific items, and conduct granular
restores. Being able to recover a single Microsoft Exchange mailbox,
or even a single attachment, without having to restore the entire VM
is critical to meeting aggressive application recovery objectives.
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Most strategies require a two-step restore – Restoring critical
applications is often a two-step, two-person process that can be both
arduous and time consuming. In most cases, the backup admin is
only capable of restoring the image of the data. The application
administrator then needs to reconfigure the underlying application.The
Fix: Enable role-based access – By providing application
administrators with direct visibility into the recoverability of the
specific IT services they are responsible for managing, and enabling
them to leverage specialized data protection tools to perform granular
backup and recovery tasks, IT can bypass the time-consuming, two-step
recovery process that makes restoring applications so challenging with
traditional backup strategies.
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Modern IT infrastructure is fluid – The reality of today’s
mixed physical, virtual, and cloud environments is that application
assets no longer necessarily reside in the same place in the
underlying IT infrastructure. Some application assets may reside on a
physical server, some may reside on a virtual machine, and some may
even reside off-premise. Truly restoring an application in this
complex environment requires a search of multiple backups, in multiple
locations, to collect all the necessary components.The
Fix: Protect services, not servers – Choose a data protection
solution that provides the capability to organize, schedule, view, and
manage backups based on services, rather than servers. This will
enable admins to group all relevant assets associated with a given
application – including servers, virtual machines, and databases –
into an application group against which they can directly set and
manage recovery SLAs.
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Corruptions create vulnerability – Many organizations have
implemented high-availability, replication-centric solutions designed
to protect mission-critical data and applications. However, in the
event of a corruption, not only is data replicated, but so, too, is
the command or error that caused the corruption in the first place.
Without the ability to restore an application to a point in time
before a corruption occurred, organizations still are exposed to risk.The
Fix: Leverage continuous data protection (CDP) – With true CDP
solutions such as Quest
NetVault® FastRecover, IT can restore critical applications back
to any point in time. This provides protection against corruptions
that might otherwise wipe out an entire application.
Supporting Quote:
Walter Angerer, senior vice president and general manager, Data
Protection, Quest Software
“The role of backup and recovery continues to evolve. Administrators no
longer are consumed by legacy data protection challenges like breaking
the backup window and ensuring the organization has at least one good
copy of its data. Instead, restoring the critical applications that
power business and technology services has become the top priority. By
investing in application-aware technologies and building a holistic
backup and recovery strategy that emphasizes the need to quickly restore
these critical assets, organizations will be better prepared to meet the
data protection challenges of the modern world.”
Supporting Resources:
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Quest Software, Inc.: http://www.quest.com/
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Quest Data Protection Community: http://communities.quest.com/community/data-protection
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More Quest news: http://www.quest.com/newsroom/
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Twitter: http://
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Facebook: http://www.quest.com/facebook
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LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/
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Quest TV: http://www.quest.com/tv/
About Quest:
Established in 1987, Quest Software (Nasdaq: QSFT) provides simple and
innovative IT management solutions that enable more than 100,000 global
customers to save time and money across physical and virtual
environments. Quest products solve complex IT challenges ranging from database
management, data
protection, identity
and access management, monitoring,
user workspace
management to Windows
management.
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