Venyu Blog

Writing on Forbes.com Edward L. Haletky, an author and industry consultant on the subject of virtualization, contends that for SMBs the value of virtualization-based backups is directly proportional to the cost to the organization if that data was permanently lost.

Haletky contends that since business continuity preparedness and disaster recovery implementations can be expensive, it’s important to calculate the value of the data you want to protect and the cost to the organization if this data were permanently lost. Otherwise, you risk overspending and committing resources to reclaiming data that’s not worth the cost of recovery.

For example, if your company has 100,000 pieces of user data worth $10 per user, its value would be $1 million ($10 x 100,000). However, if the information is worth only five cents per user, the value would be $5,000 ($0.05 x 100,000). It’s clear that committing both physical and financial resources to recovering data worth $1 million would be critical to the long-term viability of that SMB.

As Haletky further proposes, virtualization can significantly improve disaster recovery and business continuity preparedness, enabling the IT department to choose from a range of outage responses, such as restarting applications, switching servers or even recovering files with minimal downtime. Haletky outlines a step-by-step process to help businesses decide the best course of action in deploying a virtualized infrastructure informed by high-availability, fault-tolerant solutions that enable SMBs to maintain their competitive edge and to avert potential crippling disaster scenarios.