Why Replication Is Not Enough to Keep Your Business Running

While you may be familiar with multiple replication products and vendors, don’t confuse the technology of data or server replication with Disaster Recovery.

Replication is not a disaster recovery solution nor does it

provide business continuity. So what exactly is replication?

Replication is the process of copying data from one location to another over a SAN, LAN,

or local WAN. Source: TechTarget

This provides you with multiple up-to-date copies of your data.

Look at replication as an aspect of disaster recovery and business continuity.

Although it is a key technology in order to implement a

complete DR/BC plan, it needs to be combined with data

deduplication, virtual servers, or even the cloud.

But let’s take a step back to really understand business continuity.

According to ESG Sr. Analyst Jason Buffington, “business continuity is ensuring that your IT and business processes continue, involving availability technologies as well as mitigation methods, etc.”

Ultimately, your entire IT infrastructure needs to be up

and running in order to assure that your employees can

continue working during any disaster or IT outage.

While you need to protect your data, just as importantly, you need to protect and keep your applications up.

Having survivable data does not equate to disaster recovery.

“Business continuity and disaster recovery is more about people and processes than it is about the data,” according to Buffington.

By combining appropriate planning, IT orchestration and instrumentation with a surviving

copy of your data, you then have a real BC/DR plan.

For example: it’s typical for a vendor to be able to backup

and replicate his or her virtual machines to another data

center.

Many of these vendors are even willing to turn the servers back

on in case something goes wrong.

However, unless all of the servers are all powered back up and in an exact order…

Photo by Tim Cummins

It is still considered downtime.

Photo by Jenn Vargas

Not only does the order in which

servers are spun up important…

Photo by GYLo

But making sure all the interconnected elements of your network (e.g. Active Directories, etc.) are also up and working is vital.

Photo  by  CJ  Isherwood  

What you need to look for is not just the ability to bring up

individual or multiple servers, but rather be able to virtualize your

entire LAN.

The other aspect that is important to consider that may be forgotten around certain technology is that a proper Business Continuity program requires people and processes as well.

All these elements combined will form the basis for your company

resiliency plan.

Photo by Lauren Manning

   

So ask yourself, how resilient is your company? Do you have the right technology, the proper documentation, and executive sponsorship?

Watch the ESG video on hybrid cloud for data protection to learn

more.

Find what your company’s resiliency score is with our

“Disaster Recovery Maturity Framework” whitepaper.

The Axcient Solution

Axcient’s Recovery-as-a-Service cloud eliminates data loss, keeps applications up and running, and makes sure that IT infrastructures never go down. Axcient replaces legacy backup, business continuity, disaster recovery and archiving products, with a single integrated platform that mirrors an entire business in the cloud, making it simple to restore data, failover applications, and virtualize servers or an entire office with a click. Thousands of businesses trust Axcient to keep their applications running and employees productive. Learn more at axcient.com.

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