Maximizing Business Continuity And Minimizing Recovery Time Objectives In Windows Server Environments

Maximizing business continuity while minimizing business disruption can be especially challenging for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) following a server failure. Resources are limited, so there isn't a lot of help to get systems back online. Having a server out of commission is never pleasant, but the consequences of business disruption are grimmer for SMBs than they are for large enterprises that can disperse the effect of a server meltdown.

That's why it is vitally important to keep your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) at a level that helps you avoid the serious consequences of a break in the flow of your daily business. Your RTO is the maximum amount of time your systems can be out of commission from when a disruption occurs to the moment your system is available again. Minimizing your RTO helps you avoid the consequences of a long-term break in business continuity.

Unfortunately, most backup and recovery strategies are bound by technological limitations. When your server has many terabytes (TB) of data that must be recovered not to mention the operating system and applications it takes many hours to restore everything from the original volume, even at relatively rapid disk speeds.

In addition, the promise of virtualization may seem attractive for SMBs, particularly since virtualization can help address limitations on resources. But the reality of the cost and time expenditures to transfer data to virtual servers, in addition to the complexity of virtualization technology, makes this prohibitive.

Finally, upgrading to a new Windows server can frustrate IT staff with its complexity and potential for disaster. The migration process can place a heavy load on SMBs with limited IT resources.

This white paper outlines each of these issues, why they are important for SMBs to address and how to resolve them while maximizing business continuity and minimizing IT resources necessary to accomplish the demands of maintaining Windows servers.