According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group study, only 8% of organizations have virtualized the majority of servers that could be. Another study from Techaisle shows that only 60% of servers were virtualized in 2014, and while the figure is expected to rise, total virtualization is nowhere in sight. The same study also noted some of the major challenges of virtualization, including costs and management complexity.
If your organization has an evolving IT infrastructure, then chances are you have a hybrid server environment, comprising of physical and virtual servers. There is no doubt that all of these servers contain important business applications and data – and service interruption on any of them – physical and virtual alike – can lead to financial losses, dissatisfied users and customers, and even failure to meet compliance standards and regulations. .
So why would you, as an IT professional, ever decide to put unequal levels of data protection in place on different parts of your environment, based on whether it’s virtualized or not?
A professional backup solution should protect your entire environment – physical AND virtual – and allow you to apply unified policies, common reporting, and aggregated notifications across your entire hybrid environment.
To ensure complete data protection, IT departments should treat all data as equally important, regardless whether it resides in physical Windows or Linux, virtual VMware, Hyper-V, Xen or any other hypervisor. You should be able to restore your server quickly - to the same or a dissimilar environment – so you can quickly achieve your recovery time objective (RTO) of restoring data and service to users and customers.
Stay in Control of Your Data Protection at All Times
Do not be boxed in by a backup solution that dictates what you should virtualize – your business should drive the decision. You cannot afford to be a test subject of an unproven product that appears to be “free”. Choosing a data protection solution from an experienced technology provider that supports a mix of environments is the only sensible option for companies of any size.
Additionally, you likely do not have the spare time to manage multiple backup products. You have a myriad of other more important tasks, rather than meddling with different interfaces from multiple backup vendors. Simplify your life, have more free time, and sleep better at night! Choose a professional-grade backup solution that provides complete data protection across your entire hybrid physical and virtual environment.
If you would like to learn more, see this use case on backing up your hybrid infrastructure.
About Acronis
A Swiss company founded in Singapore in 2003, Acronis has 15 offices worldwide and employees in 50+ countries. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud is available in 26 languages in 150 countries and is used by over 20,000 service providers to protect over 750,000 businesses.