When Mobile Systems Fail

For most of today’s small businesses, “going mobile” is a given. According to research from International Data Corp., two-thirds of the U.S. workforce will be considered mobile by the end of this year. But while the deployment of mobile technologies has transformed many small businesses, fueling tremendous productivity gains, many of these organizations find themselves at a loss when their mobile systems fail. This article looks at what small businesses can do to speed the recovery of their mobile Windows systems.

Two ways to recover
Do you remember what restoring a failed laptop used to entail? Besides the days of effort it took to get the system up and running again, there would inevitably be some accompanying loss of data.

That doesn’t cut it for today’s small businesses, which can’t afford that kind of downtime. As the Data Mobility Group, a storage industry research firm, put it in a September 2005 Research Note, “There are two ways to recover servers, workstations, and laptops-the hard way and the easy way. The hard way requires you to piece together the operating system and applications. The easy way allows you to recover . . . to any previous state with one command.”

When mobile systems fail, you need a solution that eliminates the need to reinstall, reconfigure, and repatch operating systems and applications (not to mention system settings). Moreover, you need a solution capable of a full restoration in just minutes. The logic is simple: Anything that disrupts the safety and accessibility of information creates downtime, and downtime costs money. When disruptions do occur, you need to restore to the “last good” state, as rapidly as possible, without risk of repeating the same failure.

Increasingly, this is being accomplished through the use of so-called snapshot technology, which captures and encapsulates all files and configurations in one, easy-to-manage recovery point (also known as a “system image”). This also enables you to create full and incremental recovery points throughout the day – without interrupting user productivity or application usage. Certain events can trigger an automatic recovery point, such as when a user logs on or logs off, or when stored information exceeds a certain amount of space.

Restoring to any device
When a mobile system does fail, some recovery solutions allow users to restore laptops to their previous states but with one important restriction-they can only restore to hardware with the same configuration as the hardware that had been backed up. That means you’re required to maintain duplicate hardware, which is a costly requirement. But chances are that you don’t routinely have a “clone” on hand that’s ready to be boxed up and shipped out as a replacement.

That’s why you must be able to recover any Windows laptop to any other Windows laptop, independent of hardware configuration. Users should be able to recover from an HP laptop to a Dell laptop, for example, including restoring to machines with entirely different motherboards, mass storage devices, network interface cards, video adapters, etc. Eliminating the need to purchase identical hardware means you can restore more quickly and effortlessly.

IDC has characterized today’s computing environment as “a large, distributed, and complex infrastructure of servers, desktops, and laptops [that are] constantly changing to stay current with the needs of fiercely competitive businesses.” In addition, you may have employees who are frequently on the road. A system failure could cost an organization thousands of dollars in productivity losses. Clearly, manual recovery is no longer a viable option.

A superior recovery solution eliminates the need for in-person visits to perform a full recovery. Moreover, when a system fails, you want to eliminate the need to reinstall, reconfigure, and repatch operating systems and applications. One-step restoration greatly improves recovery speeds and enhances system availability.

Conclusion
Today, more and more small businesses are starting to view rapid recovery solutions as essential for their laptops and desktops. Such solutions not only enhance system availability but they also help organizations protect against risk events and ensure the integrity of their information. Given today’s volatile computing environment, that makes them a must-have resource.

From symantec