Traditional Problems

The traditional protection/disaster recovery paradigm of backing up Microsoft Exchange Server data once a day to removable media and then storing the media off-site as a primary means of recovery from disaster is unacceptable because:

 Tapes are subject to loss, damage, or prolonged delivery times due to off-site storage.

 Data restoration speed from tape can be up to 400x slower than recovering data from disk.

 Experienced personnel must be available to ensure the proper manual steps are taken during recovery (and can still make mistakes during the process).

 Tape-based backup and recovery systems are constrained by a number of issues that may not be discovered until a recovery operation is attempted. These include:

• According to Microsoft 42% of attempted recoveries from tape fail; even if this is inflated by 2x, that means 1 in 5 fails.
• Over 34% of companies do not test their backups and of those that tested, 77% found that their tape backups fail to restore properly. (Storage Magazine)
• Cost of Exchange failure ranges between $1,000 to $10,000 per hour, depending on company operations and circumstances. (Softletter)
  
  
 Data created between backups is not protected; therefore, restoring the last backup wipes out all changes that took place between the last backup time (usually 24 hours) and the disaster/corruption event.
• Full daily backups performed @ midnight leaves a full 24 hours of corporate productivity completely vulnerable.
• Intra-day backups can minimize this, but organizations run into time and resource constraints.

In short, the coverage provided by traditional data protection solutions is inadequate for today's 24x7x365 reliance on Microsoft Exchange.  Restoring data made hours or days ago interrupts your business as well as failing to protect against critical data loss, introducing a myriad of issues and costs that can have a severe and long-lasting effect upon your organization's business.

CIOs & IT professionals are seeking less exposure to downtime and the potential of data loss.

When disruptions to Exchange occur, IT departments need to restart the enterprise, restore Exchange data to the "moment before" state as rapidly as possible, and do it without risking a repeat of the same failure. And no matter what the cause, when Exchange and the vital business information it holds aren't available, every minute down costs your organization money.

This growing urgency of backup and recovery issues comes as enterprises are under increasing regulatory pressure from such sources as the governance requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, the privacy requirements of HIPAA, and the homeland defense measures of the USA Patriot Act. This regulatory climate requires CIOs to implement policy, process management, monitoring, audit, documentation, and reporting solutions that can ensure accountability, transparency, and compliance. Failure to comply can result in lost business and customer confidence, in addition to financial, criminal and civil liability.

IT professionals are increasingly caught in the middle of conflicting data protection demands. They are being held to higher service level agreements, lower thresholds for data loss, and faster data recovery requirements. And at the same time they are pressured to handle additional requirements with lower budgets. In other words, they must do more, with less.

There is a solution.