Unitrends calls on UK Firms to “join the assured disaster recovery evolution”

Unitrends, the industry’s fastest-growing multi-environment data protection company, has called on UK businesses to reassess the effectiveness of their disaster recovery (DR) policies and solutions and join the “assured disaster recovery evolution.”

While many companies using traditional DR products test their recoverability just once or twice a year

Unitrends' solutions automatically test processes and policies every hour against preset recovery times and objectives, working out to more than 8,000 times each year. Such regularity of testing gives everyone responsible for data protection and integrity a far greater degree of confidence in a successful, reliable recovery.

“Unlike traditional DR incarnations that are often based on technology a decade or more old, assured DR automates the testing and back-up processes that create solid recovery strategies. So, if your disaster recovery isn't assured, then your data protection strategy most likely has its feet firmly in the Stone Age,” says Kevin Moreau, managing director EMEA for Unitrends.

Moreau continues: “Most companies still think they have to manually test their disaster recovery products. It's typically a mammoth task so, at best, it's done once or twice a year. This doesn't give a reliable or realistic picture of how effective a company's DR plans actually are and, as a consequence, when a real disaster strikes, most organisations are woefully unprepared. You don't need to look much further than at the damaged reputations of some of the UK's best known high street banks to see what can happen when an IT system goes down and you can't get it back online quickly.”

Luke Cifarelli, Storage Sales Account Manager, at CareTower, comments: “In our experience, a lot of resellers struggle to provide a disaster recovery product that meets modern business needs. However, the approach offered by Unitrends removes the need for all that prehistoric manual DR testing by automating the entire process.”

Cifarelli claims that his firms customers also value the freedom offered by Unitrends to pick the mix of IT solutions they want to deploy, rather than being constrained by limited DR vendor technology. “For CareTower, this is where Unitrends excels and differentiates itself from the competition,” he added.

Moreau argues that if a business wants to remain competitive in a tough global economy, they need to avoid the expensive commercial consequences of a failed or slow recovery. He believes that successful companies must start ending their reliance on outdated disaster recovery products that force them to manually test DR strategies in a completely unrealistic and ineffective way.

Moreau concludes: “The time is right, and the technology is available, for companies to move away from DR products that were never designed to cope with the mix of physical, virtual and cloud-based components that are present in most modern IT networks. The world has moved on, so it's time they moved their DR out of the Stone Age.”