AutoVerify: 5 Benefits to Automatic Backup Verification
Most, if not all Managed Service Providers (MSPs) agree manually testing backup verification and disaster recovery is annoying, repetitive, and labor-intensive. It doesn’t improve the quality of a client’s IT environment, or provide visible value to clients. And yet, it’s mandatory to ensure business continuity. At least it used to be… Automatic backup verification, testing, and regular data integrity checks eliminates the fear, worry, work, and stress of backup quality and completion tasks. Notifications alert you to any issues, while you sit back, relax, and reap these benefits.
What is AutoVerify?
AutoVerify launched in beta in August, 2019 as a default feature of Axcient’s business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solution, x360Recover. Every day, AutoVerify automatically virtualizes the latest backup recovery point for each system. Then it runs numerous tests to check for bootability, operating system health, data corruption, and filesystem and application integrity. Before initiating automatic backup verification, AutoVerify confirms the data on the protected system.
AutoVerify runs in the cloud instead of on local appliances, giving you the same provable recovery you enjoy with appliance-based backups. As part of x360Recover, AutoVerify enables backup virtualization to the Axcient Cloud, or your private cloud, with Bring Your Own Data Center (BYODC). Another default feature, Virtual Office, enables self-managed disaster recovery so you can quickly initiate virtualization – no support necessary. Additionally, x360Recover includes Direct-to-Cloud (D2C) hardware-free backup and disaster recovery (BDR) for endpoint backup, turn-key and no-appliance BDR, and public cloud backup.
While the entire x360Recover solution offers MSPs a wide range of benefits, these five pertain specifically to AutoVerify:
1. Proactively Solve Issues Before They’re Problems
AutoVerify monitors all key operations with anonymized cloud telemetry. AutoVerify provides daily proof of backup recoverability with an in-depth, detailed report. Defective software updates, unbootable systems, incomplete or corrupt backups, and other critical system issues are pinpointed for immediate response. Using these insights, MSPs can proactively address issues before they become problems, avoid potential service interruption, and close any doors left open for bad actors.
Not only does AutoVerify ensure successful BDR for protected systems, but with visibility into production servers, it also identifies disk corruption and other errors that can impact server production performance, reliability, and associated backups. Awareness of these issues at source production server level lets you address them in the production environment before backups begin. Without this forward-thinking technology, detecting these problems during recovery could be catastrophic.
2. Trust Your Backups and End “Backup Burn”
How many times has a backup software told you backup was successful – green check and everything – only to be burned? When you go to restore a recovery point and some or all of it is unusable, you’re a victim of “backup burn.” Regardless of how it happened – maybe the backup didn’t correctly capture the right data, or the backup data was corrupted – the result is the same. The backup is not restorable.
Not being able to trust your backups can be all-consuming, and the fear of backup burn keeps a lot of MSPs up at night. The tests run, and reports produced by AutoVerify, ensure all protected systems are preserved with backup snapshot status, bootVM checks, and results from the latest data encryption test. This easily accessible aggregate health status information gives you peace of mind, confidence and trust in your backups.
“AutoVerify is a really key component that I like. And we didn’t trust it for a long time. We’ve been manually verifying that it [AutoVerify] works and the image is able to start backing up. We were going through on a quarterly basis, and we’ve been doing that forever because backups are that important, and we’re still doing it, but we haven’t found any discrepancies.”
– Phillip Long, Founder and CEO of Business Information Solutions, Inc. (BIS)
3. Let Notifications Direct You Instead of Fear
Of course, if something doesn’t go as planned, you’re notified. Alerts and escalation rules let you determine when techs need to be made aware of an issue. Additionally, AutoVerify supports direct integration with PSA and RMM tools to seamlessly capture data and boot VM screenshots. While other vendors offer solutions said to trigger certain tests or workflows, they’re vulnerable to mistakes when the solution is initially configured, or a new protected server is added. AutoVerify is built-in to x360Recover, so it intelligently tests everything it can, every time.
“With technology like AutoVerify, we can rest easy knowing that Axcient has built in protections for our clients’ data. We have confidence in Axcient’s solutions and appreciate that we have a vendor partner going the extra mile to make sure our clients’ businesses are up and running if the worst happens.”
– Paul Charles, Chief Technology Officer at DataTrends
4. Remove the Risks of Human Error
As a default feature of Axcient’s BCDR solution, x360Recover, AutoVerify automatically virtualizes the latest backup recovery point daily for each system.
Manual processes and un-automated legacy tools leave a lot of room for human error. AutoVerify intelligently and automatically runs tests based on the operating system and software installed within the system. For instance, if AutoVerify detects Microsoft Exchange on a server installed on a system, it will automatically perform Exchange-specific integrity verification checks. These integrity checks ensure that the database is mountable and capable of granular recovery, so best not to leave it to chance.
5. Reduce Your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
As with many automatic and intelligent tools built to solve modern problems, AutoVerify provides significant savings for MSPs. Technicians get back the precious time they spend manually verifying backups, and fixing issues during recovery failover. Automatic issue detection and alerting, escalation rules, and proactively addressing backup consistency issues, contribute to innovation in SLA-based alerting and RTO insurance, deeper PSA integration, focus on business growth, and overall, lower TCO.
“Whenever AutoVerify says that it will start, it starts. So that’s a huge component from a time-saving point. We’re going to eventually trust it [AutoVerify], and stop doing the manual verification, which is going to save my guy 20 to 30 hours a quarter… That’s another savings.”
– Phillip Long, founder and CEO of Business Information Solutions, Inc. (BIS)
Now, it’s Your Turn
Historically, MSPs have had to rely on multiple vendors to meet a diverse range of clients, but the consequences of vendor sprawl can be fatal. Axcient x360Recover embraces simplicity and standardization allowing MSPs to satisfy all client BDR environments with just one solution. These are the top five benefits we’ve heard for automatic backup verification, and now we’re inviting you to see it for yourself!
Start your 14-day Free Trial, or Schedule a Demo and a Product Expert will walk you through this all-in-one solution. Get an idea of how much your MSP could grow with significant savings, confidence, and trust in your backups.
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Check out some other interesting pieces from our blog: Learn more about how Axcient supports partners with No-cost Onboarding and Ongoing Training, we dove into how chain-based backup works and why chain-free is the way to be, we talked with Jason Phelps from Huntress Labs about planning for the next ransomware attack, our CEO David Bennett explains why the current cybersecurity landscape means traditional backup is dead, or learn how you can ditch pricey on-site appliances with Local Cache for Direct-to-Cloud BCDR.
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