As every enterprise knows—typically from first-hand experience—hardware and software failures, natural disasters, and even planned maintenance result in downtime that can bring business to a halt. Not only does this lead to frustrated end users and overwhelmed IT departments, it can also result in damaged brands and the loss of critical information and revenue. Implementing a reliable, rapid recovery strategy can be time-consuming and expensive. You must maintain recovery equipment, often in a separate location, that mirrors your production environment. This means upgrades and changes to your primary and recovery systems must occur simultaneously. Because of the difficulty and time required, many companies simply don't have comprehensive business continuity or disaster recovery plans to cover all their devices, data and applications.

Virtualization Makes Continuity and Recovery Simple

A holistic virtualization strategy also allows you to maintain an instant fail-over plan that provides business continuity throughout disruptive events. By enabling you to convert OS and application instances into data files, it can help automate and streamline backup, replication, and movement providing more robust business continuity and speeding recovery in the case of an outage or natural disaster. Server virtualization can help ensure that services are available when they are needed because it facilitates a rapid and automatic restart of applications after IT failure. By using virtualization to create a more efficient and dynamic server infrastructure, organizations can increase the availability of their server infrastructure, reduce disruptive events, and minimize the time and resources needed to support the infrastructure.

Virtualization brings high availability to a broader set of business-critical systems that may not have invested in traditional expensive and complex high availability solutions. Because of the hardware independence, existing servers can be re-purposed for business continuity or disaster recovery rather buying and establishing duplicate servers for rapid recovery.

A virtualization strategy allows you to maintain an instant fail-over plan that provides business continuity throughout disruptive events. With the right tools, you can enable automated back-up, replication, and rapid movement of servers, desktops, and applications.

Microsoft's Disaster Recovery and Continuity Solutions

Microsoft provides several tools that facilitate business continuity of your virtualized infrastructure while minimizing the time and resources needed to implement and support it. With System Center Virtual Machine Manager, you can ensure that all VMs stay current and run in parallel. It makes disaster recovery and continuity as easy as copying a file. With a few clicks of the mouse you can manage your backup site remotely, confident that it is identical to your production site. Virtual Machine Manager also helps with continuity during planned server maintenance. By giving you the flexibility to shift workloads between physical servers, it lets you perform maintenance without disrupting service.

System Center Data Protection Manager extends these capabilities by maintaining snapshot-based back-up for more robust restoring. It captures data changes in real-time and synchronizes regularly, enabling IT and end-users to recover data in minutes.

To ensure continuity of your applications, use Microsoft Application Virtualization. It turns applications into data files that can be treated—and replicated—just like other enterprise data. Since applications reside in a centralized location and are streamed on demand, you don't have to rebuild individual images across the organization. This cuts end-user downtime into minutes, instead of the hours or days it typically takes to get users up and running.