No matter your organizational goals, it's likely that availability of your services is vital. Unless you need to protect secure data on servers on-premises, every small to medium business can benefit from the disaster recovery and business continuity offered by the cloud. Microsoft applications like SharePoint offer an easy way to backup files and restore data in the event of an emergency. Before you make the decision that your data is safe enough, ask yourself one simple question: How Quickly Can Your Servers Recover From a Disaster?

Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity

Whether your data is stored on a public or private cloud (or even a hybrid), it's important for your IT team to understand how to recover from a failure, and lessen the risk of one taking place. Many servers utilize solutions like vSphere HA. But tools like SharePoint come with existing features that can help you recover from a data loss or keep your servers running in the event of a disaster.

Business Continuity

NetApp is a utility that helps your organization maintain service availability, even during an unplanned downtime. Specifically, NetApp helps SharePoint users:

• Maximize Server application uptime when applying upgrades or performing maintenance.
• Continued storage operations during maintenance.
• Cut costs on network efficiencies and data deduplication.

NetApp business continuity tools deliver a higher availability of many SharePoint services, while offering users very cost-effective solutions in the event of a server disaster.

Backup and Recovery

NetApp isn't just for continuity; it also gives users flexible and quick options for data recovery in the event of a server failure. The utility enables fast backup of entire SharePoint farms, while allowing users to recover data within minutes of loss. You can count on the NetApp solution to:

• Improve governance through AvePoint DocAve integration.
• Utilize rapid backups to meet backup windows.
• Restore any SharePoint item in minutes (NetApp SnapRestore).
• Use policy-based automation to keep backup operations simple.

SharePoint users may create hundreds of different backups on their recovery disk, but storage capacity is maximized with NetApp's built-in ability to recognize duplicate files across backups. Storing only different files keeps server costs low without endangering your backup files.

When your IT department first begins working with SharePoint and NetApps, it's likely that there will be some resistance. While SharePoint may not offer the same level of control for IT developers, the technical work required of them will decrease as cloud solutions begin to take care of some processes.