Acronis provides disaster recovery tips for businesses to prepare for hurricane season

New tips for effective IT disaster recovery that can help businesses protect their data and recover quickly from natural disasters

Woburn, MA, June 15, 2011 - With hurricane season upon us, it is increasingly important for businesses to back up their data assets to maintain continuity that can weather any storm. According to a recent survey by Acronis¹, approximately one-third of U.S. businesses reported having no backup and disaster recovery strategy in place. Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, has issued five tips to help businesses ensure all their critical data is fully protected and can be recovered quickly in the event of a hurricane or other natural disaster.

1. Opt into disk imaging. To ensure that companies can be up and running quickly, make images of computers and servers so full copies of data and applications are safely tucked away. You can either store on different machines, in different locations or reach for a cloud solution. In the event that something happens, the images can be loaded onto to new hardware in hours rather than days.
2. Jump to the cloud for business continuity. Onsite backups are great for day-to-day recovery, but if they are destroyed too, you need to consider off-site data storage solution. Another alternative is to contract with a cloud service provider to not only back up to the cloud, but also recover onto virtual machines.
3. Recover to dissimilar hardware. Hardware-agnostic software can recover from the backup image of the failed system onto any available hardware and replace the old machine's hardware drivers with the new ones, a process that takes only about 15 minutes. Virtualization users can opt to recover mission-critical machines even more quickly by recovering either a physical or virtual machine disk image to a standby virtual machine. It can then be launched immediately with a mouse click.
4. Include both your physical and virtual environments. Use a backup and recovery solution that takes care of backups and recoveries of all your machines. For ease of management consider a solution that protects all the platforms you're using. Then, if disaster strikes, your organization can much more easily coordinate a recovery that will minimize or eliminate the potential for lost productivity.
5. Make a plan and follow it. Make sure if disaster does strike, you know how to get your data back quickly. Look for data protection and disaster recovery solutions that provide a step by step guide to recover your systems and files. It is rare that the person who made the backup is the same person on hand to recover when disaster does strike!

"Any data loss, through natural disaster or simple human mistake can spell success or failure for businesses," said Izzy Azeri, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Americas, "Our tips are a trusted set of best practice that can help businesses, small and large, develop comprehensive backup and recovery plans that minimize the financial and productivity impacts that occur after unplanned disruptions."

Acronis provides backup and recovery software that helps small and large businesses ensure not only the preservation of digital assets, but also the rapid recovery of those assets after a storm has passed. For more information, go to www.acronis.com.