October 11, 2017

Bridging Legacy and New BDR

If you’re still using an old legacy system for backup and disaster recovery, you’ve probably noticed by now that it hasn’t kept up with the rest of the business landscape. Successful cybercrime attacks like ransomware and user expectations for 24/7 uptime have put radical new demands on IT leaders to store and recover data quickly and safely. Yet legacy BDR systems are unlikely to match the speed and power of your other tech, or help you backup more data, retain it for longer periods of time, and nimbly recover it in minutes when needed.

Does any of this sound familiar?

• You’ve added multiple point solutions over the years and now your team has to deal with multiple help desks, manage multiple vendor relationships and shift between multiple software interfaces.
• As data sizes grow, your backup windows extend beyond SLA requirements and slow down performance.
• Your recovery is slow, hurting revenue and the customer experience.
• Your restoration process is so complex that you’re not sure you could recover from a severe disaster.
• You’re relying on tape but are tired of corrupt and outdated backups – and you know they can’t offer safe long-term retention or nimble data access.
• Your team is spending too much time and effort on basic matters like testing backups, calling vendors and struggling to make solutions work together.

You probably know by now that it’s time to upgrade to a more modern BDR solution. At the same time, you might worry that the cost and effort are too much. The reality is that your legacy system is going to eventually equal loss - lost productivity, lost transactions and possibly a loss of respect for your brand if the worst happens.

But here’s the good news: introducing an efficient, safer and faster solution doesn’t have to be a stressful or extreme overhaul. You can tackle your storage and recovery challenges by bridging the old and the new.

Modernizing Your Legacy System

You have several options for making changes to your BDR ecosystem.

One quick and easy solution: adding a stand-alone appliance like our onQ Ransomware Edition. onQ RE is designed to help teams recover servers infected with ransomware, and it works as an add-on to your current system. This is a perfect solution for teams that aren’t ready to change anything yet, but still want the security and speed required to escape the ransomware noose. Similarly, onQ vApp can be deployed onto your existing hardware using any spare capacity you have from a SAN replacement or a server refresh. While it’s virtual, you can protect both physical and virtual machines with it. Just be sure you’ve got the power to run your recovery clones in production.

Sometimes, however, you need to abandon a sinking ship entirely. If you need hours or days to recover, if your traditional backup infrastructure is too limited to make use of the cloud and you’re feeling crushed under your growing data, it’s time to look for a solution that’s equal to the task.

The best way to make this painless? Look for a unified BDR solution. There’s no point in replacing multiple vendors with a new collection. Roll over to a vendor who can handle literally everything you need – from long-term archiving to immediate recovery. Your team will save time with just one onboarding process, one support team and one BDR solution that runs everything in a smoothly orchestrated fashion.

Some of the things to aim for include:

• Replacing any tape or disk storage with an appliance that offers local HA and offsite DR
• Cloud capabilities that can reduce your datacenter bills and handle your growing data without the need for a physical expansion of your hardware
• Sophisticated deduplication that can manage large data sets with less bandwidth
• Automation that takes the human error – and time demands – out of testing, backup creation and incremental updates
• Simple and fast recovery that lets you spin up a clone of your environment in under 5 minutes
• Encryption and other security measures that keep your backups protected
• Scalability that can accommodate your organization’s expanding data and growing industry footprint without make you pay for unused resources
• Easy and quick integration, so your team can stay focused on their real mission while the solution is deployed

Introducing a new BDR solution doesn’t have to mean downtime and stress. Moving to a more advanced solution will end up paying for itself by offering faster recovery and liberating the team from tedious administrative tasks – but crossing the bridge from legacy to new BDR can and should be simple as well.