6 Key Capabilities of Top Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions

Choosy enterprises closely examine the type of backup and recovery software platform that a service provider offers to ensure that it can meet not only the industry standards and requirements, but that it will also adapt and scale to potential future changes in the space. Here are technical requirements that an enterprise should demand in the backup and recovery platform. You don’t want to wait until a crisis occurs to learn whether your backup and recovery service provider is adequate. Here are several key capabilities that suggest a backup and recovery vendor is adequately prepared to protect your business.

Do they write a custom Data Backup Policy? Think of your new backup product as a fine suit. You would likely not try on he suit, ballpark your measurements, and happen upon a perfect fit. Much like a custom BDR plan, the tailor would adjust your business needs to encompass specific services, and to what extent your company will implement them regarding size, and preference.

Do they write a custom Disaster Recovery Plan? Little more complicated- may times buyers neglect the disaster recovery piece. The are many examples of times that organizations suffered a major data disaster and were saved by their providers DR services, most of which include the deployment of on-site technicians, servers, computers- anything that will help your business bounce back from the unexpected. As you shop for a plan, develop a DR plan with your new provider. Best case scenario, they will be anticipating this piece of the implementation process, planning a capacity planning exercise, and assuring you beyond measure that you are in capable hands.

For more cloud platform vendor information, including profiles, and product feature reviews, download our 2016 Backup and Disaster Recovery Platform Vendor Buyer’s Guide to share with your colleagues.

Does the product have the ability to use existing infrastructure/hardware agnostic? Basically, hardware, or device agnosticism is the capacity for new hardware or software to work with various systems without requiring any special adaptations.  Great BDR products are is designed to be compatible across most common systems, and once you have your new product running, it should be seamless, and easy to manage and use by teams trained on the traditional hardware.

Do they monitor your backup jobs for errors and breaches? Careful with this- while you want an external team monitoring your data to make sure nothing goes haywire- it also introduces another way for your data to be compromised. There are several best practices that will limit the potential for a third party mishap- like single usernames for the ability to quickly deny access, or you could permit remote access for external service providers only on demand. This will allow IT to automatically disable these tools using time-based and other rule sets.

Do they offer a cancellation policy with no risk to cancel services? This is better executed sooner than later, if you for some reason are unsatisfied with the product, how it’s integrating with your existing technology, or you fear it to be inadequate in some way. Once of the greatest pitfalls of cloud backup, you you decide to go that route, is moving your data out from a backup solution. It’s the difference between a hoarder living in a two bedroom apt for 1 year, or 5 years- you may at that point need a disaster recovery for your backup plan. A good solution will make this process painless and as seamless as possible.

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Do they offer deduplication and compression capabilities? Speaking of an overcrowded apartment- make sure your new solution includes one of the single most important capabilities of a next- gen data management platform: Deduplication and compression. Commonly known as “single-instance storage” and “intelligent compression”, this advanced data storage method takes a piece of data and stores it once, and refers to that data as often as it is asked by a pointer that replaces the entire string of data.It seems obvious, but not all solutions offer this, or do it well. Check out more about the capability here on druva.com