Whether you’ve been hit with a ransomware attack or an internal mishap (malicious or human error), when disaster strikes, it’s critical to quickly recover from data loss. The question is: if a disaster were to happen today, could you predictably recover your backup data—when and where you need it—withouT compromise? The ability to ensure predictable recovery gives you confidence in meeting your SLAs and in the resiliency of your organization. To assess your readiness for achieving predictable recovery, ask yourself these questionS based on a framework of core recovery attributes.

1. Can you meet your predefined backup SLAs?
Failed backup jobs and long backup windows that constantly bleed into production time can force compromise. This is because it becomes more convenient to skip the protection of some mission critical data. However, data that is not protected cannot be recovered. If you are unable to complete your backups successfully, how can you meet your business SLAs? Achieving predictable recovery requires a backup solution that protects all mission critical data without impacting normal production time or causing backup failures.

2. Can you do a global, Google-like search for any VM, file, or object?
Exponential data growth across workloads and geographical locations, combined with legacy siloed backup architecture, makes locating data challenging. In order to predictably meet recovery SLAs, you should be able to perform a simple, Google-like search for any VM, file, or object across all workloads and locations, all from a single UI. A modern backup solution will allow you to easily locate the data that you need across locations, and puts you in the desired workflow for ensuring predictable recovery.

3. Are your snapshots healthy enough to recover predictably?
IT organizations are used to verifying their backup copies, but the current process is manual, which is error-prone and non-scientific. Recovering from a bad snapshot can delay recovery but recovering from a compromised snapshot (with cyber vulnerabilities) can expose the organization to cyber threats. So how can you ensure your snapshots are healthy? Automated policy based backup verification gives backup admins much-needed visibility into the health of all their snapshots and helps them identify the good snapshot for recovery. Added visibility reduces the recovery process and also ensures no previously known/addressed cyber vulnerabilities are reinjected into the production environment by means of recovery.

4. Is there consistency between the original and backed up data and application?
Inconsistent data can lead to ‘data not found error’, or worse, permanent data loss. A backup solution with strict consistency ensures that the data is always first protected across the cluster before acknowledging the write back to the application. Achieving predictable recovery requires support for strict consistency in order to ensure backups are application and data consistent.

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