Falconstor Community

Comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery and (BCDR) processes and the testing of these systems are critical for all companies. Often business continuity is defined as handling the company’s ability to operate, while disaster recovery (DR) stands for the ability to restore full operations. However, for IT, implementing BCDR plans is overwhelming and complex. The sheer amount of IT infrastructure components that are involved in the process makes it almost impossible to manage. For instance, in a recent survey by TechTarget, only 41 percent of IT executives said they successfully recovered all their applications during a test of their BCDR solution and 54 percent reported testing their BCDR plan twice a year or more. These numbers are disturbingly low, as recovery time is everything and effective testing improves your recovery time.

With 2011 around the corner and new budgets being built, IT is looking at how to effectively deal with the rising amount of data that needs to be effectively stored and in the event of a disaster, available for quickly recovery. In my earlier blog (http://tinyurl.com/2atf4h6), I examined the pressures faced by IT and provided two reasons why disk-based data protection is becoming immensely popular in the data center specifically around how it eliminates the backup window and how companies may still create tape backups using continuous data protection (CDP).

If you’re in charge of back-up and recovery at your organization, you likely have a lot on your mind these days.  Budget freezes.  New eDiscovery requirements.  Unabated year-over-year storage requirement growth.  And internal expectation for immediate return on investment.