Are Your Customers’ Backups Ready for the ‘Did That Just Happen’ Moment?
It has been said that roughly 20 percent of recovery attempts fail. How sure are you that you’re not in that 20 percent?
When a crisis happens and your customers ask themselves ‘Did that just happen,’ you and your backups are ready to jump in and save the day, right?
Even if a complete failure has never occurred, you want to be sure you are ready for one. That is why so much time and energy are put into backup and replication of data.
As a managed service provider, you have spent a lot of time planning and communicating with your customers about how prepared you are for moments like these. But the fact that your backups are running and you have spent a lot of hours ensuring this doesn’t protect you from the recovery issues, unless you have tested recoverability of these backups.
How many backups have you tested recently? There are examples when “successful” backups failed to restore because the issues have been hidden in the OS or application.
Consider the following:
- How often do you test the viability of your backups?
- How often do you perform restores from your backups?
- If in a crisis, are you sure you can restore a specific application?
Recovery testing of all backups for all customers’ virtual machines is not feasible unless you have some automation in place.
With the right automation in place, you can eliminate any insecurity when tackling your ‘did that just happen’ moment and alert you to problems before they potentially become BIG problems.
Veeam provides this automation out of the box. SureBackup is a patented technology that allows you to verify the recoverability of every backup for every VM, every time. All with a simplified and scheduled routine process that will save you time and money.
Imagine a Microsoft Exchange mail server VM backup. To verify this backup you would need to make sure that:
- You have an isolated environment to start a copy of production VM with its network settings preserved.
- All product dependencies are met such as Active Directory prior to bringing Exchange online.
To accomplish this with Veeam, we have the concept of an “application group”. The “application group” allow you to specify which VMs and in which order to power on the VM’s in our virtual lab, i.e. – Active Directory with global catalog first and then Exchange second. Now that the order is specified, when the SureBackup runs it will ensure the necessary applications are met and that they would function like they would in production, you can add your test scripts to verify the work of virtually any application.
Schedule a SureBackup job at any time to test the recoverability of the VM’s you have backed up. A report is generated and you can then quickly receive confirmation that they are 100 percent recoverable. Provide your customers with this same report and show off the added value your services provide them.
SureBackup is just one of the many industry leading features included in Veeam Backup & Replication at no additional charge. Other features include Instant VM Recovery which allows you to recover a failed VM in as little as 2 minutes and U-AIR (Universal Application-Item Recovery) which gives you the capability to recover individual objects from any virtualized application on any OS. For more information on the Veeam Cloud Provider program (VCP) and their offerings for Hosting, Managed Service and Cloud Providers, click here.
Carrie Webb is an internet marketing specialist at Veeam.
