Three Must-Have Features in a Backup and Disaster Recovery Solution

As senior disaster recovery engineer at Speros, Van Heath looks for three simple requirements in a backup and disaster recovery solution. It must be flexible, fast, and foolproof.

According to Van, here’s how StorageCraft ShadowProtect meets those requirements:

1. Flexible. “A big plus for StorageCraft is that it’s vendor neutral. We can restore to dissimilar hardware, or convert from one hypervisor to another.”
2. Fast. “Usually our restore times are in hours, not days. Another advantage of StorageCraft—over one weekend I converted 18 servers in our cloud from Hyper-V to VMware. I thought it would take an extremely long time. I was able to fully restore all 18 servers from a StorageCraft backup and have them up and running in less than 24 hours. That’s with data drives holding 400GB of data, domain controllers, Exchange servers—a lot of stuff. On Monday morning, our customers were none the wiser.”
3. Foolproof. “Medical facilities have strict guidelines for retention of medical records. We fully rely on StorageCraft in that aspect. We keep a continuous record of backup sets for the time period designated by their type of practice—three, six, or more years. Also, images we send offsite need to be encrypted over the wire, and StorageCraft takes care of that. The password protection feature is an even bigger advantage. Without that, anyone with StorageCraft could easily mount, convert, and restore that image and get to that patient data.”

For businesses in the healthcare field, Van advises looking for an managed service or solution provider who has a diverse backup offering. “To keep the worry factor down, look for an MSP with several tiers of backup, someone who offers offsite storage, and who is extremely knowledgeable and has a dedicated person for disaster recovery that you can talk to.”

For MSPs considering a healthcare specialty, Van advises hiring a consultant who understands medical records compliance. “We have a manager from the healthcare industry who’s well-versed in HIPAA compliancy. You really need that, because it’s not just about the backups. In healthcare it’s a lot more.”