The traditional protection and disaster recovery paradigm of backing up Microsoft Exchange Server data once per day as a primary means of disaster recovery protection is unacceptable for the following reasons:
Recovery processes are manual and prone to human error.
Tapes stored off-site take additional time to retrieve.
Recovering data from tape can be up to 400 times slower than recovering data from disk.
Problems are not detected until a restore is attempted.
According to Microsoft, 42 percent of attempted recoveries from tape fail. Cut this number in half and, still, one in five recovery attempts fail.
Over 34 percent of companies do not test their backups. Of those that tested, 77 percent discovered that their tape backups failed to restore properly (source: Storage Magazine).
The actual cost of Exchange failure ranges between $1,000 to $10,000 per hour, depending on company operations and circumstances (source: Softletter).
Data created between backups are unprotected.
Full daily backups performed at midnight leave a full 24 hours of corporate productivity without protection.
Intraday backups (backups made during the day) might minimize loss of data, but time and resource constraints make this option impractical for most organizations.
The coverage provided by traditional data protection solutions is inadequate for a contemporary 24x7x365 organization reliant on Microsoft Exchange.
Restoring data produced hours or days earlier can cause significant business interruption and the loss of productivity and critical data. These interruptions and losses introduce numerous issues and costs that can have a severe and long-term effects on an entire organization.
Continue to What About My Existing Exchange Backup Solution?