A glaring lack of comprehensive onsite and offsite backup and disaster recovery solutions by Australian small to medium businesses has created a golden opportunity for resellers.
The recently released Acronis Global Disaster Recovery (DR) Index 2011 shows businesses around the world want a single backup and recovery solution for physical, virtual and cloud environments, regardless of their attitudes towards backup and disaster recovery (February, p26).
IT system failure long ago joined death and taxes on the list of life’s certainties. Every organisation surely recognises that system failure or data loss equals lost revenue, customers and reputation.
They are losses no one wants to wear – however, the Acronis Global DR Index reveals that many SMBs still cannot get some of the basics right. They need support in obtaining executive buy-in, managing resources and implementing easy to use and reliable technology.
To some extent, there is still a lack of best practices being provided by vendors, and many SMBs rely heavily on their channel partners to be their best practices advisors to help them make the right choices.
What has made the world more complex is the fact that organisations are now presented with three different platforms for their disaster recovery strategies: physical, virtual and cloud.
So how to manage backup and DR effectively across two or more platforms?
Backing up physical machines is probably the easiest to achieve and can be done through a number of methods on various storage media. There is certainly more to think about once the virtualisation piece comes in.
According to the Acronis DR Index, 71 percent of SMBs in Australia agreed that virtualisation has either completely or partially changed the way the business manages its backup and disaster recovery.