Two Important Questions to Answer about your Backup Solution

In today’s world, IT managers are being forced to backup more and more business critical data. Often times, using the same outdated equipment. Think about it, if you are still using tape as your backup solution your data has probably doubled if not tripled since the time you initially deployed the solution. In short, you are being forced to backup a whole lot more with what amounts to be a whole lot less.
If you are looking to make a change to your backup solution, where do you start? There is so much noise in the market today around deduplication, cloud archiving, VTL, and much much more. The best way to start is to ask yourself a very basic question:

1. How long can I afford to be without my business critical data?

Now, the answer to this question will vary greatly from business to business. For instance, you may say I have four hours to get my systems back online, you may have 48 hours, or 72 hours, or you might even say, down??? I can’t afford for my systems to be down at all!
If you can answer this question, you can than begin to determine which backup and DR solutions are best for you. By that I mean, if you answer 72 hours than your options are much broader than if you were on the other end of the spectrum and answered, down time, I can’t afford any downtime.

Now, after you have determined how long you can afford for you business critical systems to be down.
2. Ask yourself how much money do we have for the project?
Today more than ever, IT managers are being squeezed and with backup and DR you can really pay as much or as little as you want with the old adage you get what you pay for. So now, you know what you’re down time threshold is, and you know how much money you are working with.

With these two questions answered, you can now start to narrow down which solutions meet your requirements!