BE Self Assessment

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You might have had a really (really) good backup strategy 2 or 3 years ago, but does it stack up today? Every vendor you’ve ever heard about is always banging on about backup and recovery being even more tricky than it was yesterday; and how it is now ever more challenging than it ever was, and, frankly it was pretty trick then … what with data growth going crazy, sprawling physical and virtualised environments, shrinking, nay, shrunk backup windows (what’s backup window?), and escalating storage management costs.

Gosh, haven’t we heard it all before? But, it is certainly true that the age old conventional backup solutions have not kept up with the data protection requirements, as well as the growth in data itself forcing substantial investments in hardware and dramatically increased administrator workload.

You might already have a good data backup strategy in place. But if your server hardware were lost or your building suddenly off limits, could you access your data and maintain business continuity? It doesn’t take much to wipe out a critical database of information. Any backup is only as reliable as its ability to restore business data, applications and systems when they are needed most.

A data protection strategy sets out how we go about minimising data protection risk. It has to be concerned with ensuring maximum effectiveness or it remains a pointless exercise. But end users I speak to in organisations large and small are still not convinced that they have reliable backup solutions in their environments – or perhaps more accurately that the backup solution isn’t quite covering everything …

There are also analyst rumours that virtual machines will outnumber physical servers in 2009. The adoption of x86 servers is making virtualisation a crucial factor, but at the same time making traditional backup solutions redundant.

We’ve put together a backup strategy assessment tool – why not have a go at it to find out how robust your Data Protection is?

Links to assessment tool: http://www.emea.symantec.com/mybackupexec/assessment/

Backup Exec Sites:

UK: www.symantec.co.uk/mybackupexec

La France: www.symantec.fr/mybackupexec

Deutschland: www.symantec.de/mybackupexec

Italia : www.symantec.it/mybackupexec

España: www.symantec.es/mybackupexec

Nederland: www.symantec.nl/mybackupexec