Recovery and the Mobile Client

By Tom Schmidt

For today's enterprises, the mobile workforce is a given. According to 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 the modern enterprise, fueling tremendous productivity gains, many organizations find themselves at a loss when their mobile systems fail. This article looks at what organizations can do to speed the recovery of mobile Windows systems while at the same time protect against risk events and ensure the integrity of their information.

Time is money
Experienced IT administrators know all too well 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 real-time enterprises, which can't afford such downtime. As the Data Mobility Group 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 the server to any previous state with one command."
 
When mobile systems fail, enterprises need a solution that eliminates the need to reinstall, reconfigure, and repatch operating systems and applications -- not to mention system settings and personalities. Moreover, they need a solution capable of a full restoration in just minutes. The logic is simple: Anything that disrupts that safety and accessibility of information creates downtime, and downtime costs organizations money. When disruptions do occur, the IT department must get the enterprise restarted, and restored to the "last good" state, as rapidly as possible, without risk of repeating the same failure.
 
Increasingly, enterprises are accomplishing this through the use of snapshot technology, which captures and encapsulates all files and configurations in one, easy-to-manage recovery point (system image). This also enables IT 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 a new application installation, user log on, log off, or when the information stored on a volume 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 IT departments are required to maintain duplicate hardware, which is a costly requirement. But chances are that most IT departments don't routinely have a clone on hand that's ready to be boxed up and shipped out as a replacement.
 
That's why IT 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 administrators can restore more quickly and effortlessly.

Unattended restorations
IDC has characterized today's IT 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, enterprises frequently have employees or locations hundreds of miles away from the IT department. A system failure could cost an organization thousands of dollars in travel and 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 bare metal recovery. (A bare metal recovery is designed to restore the computer's total contents -- operating system, applications, and data -- to the point when the bare metal restore was taken.) By making it unnecessary to restore systems manually, such a solution saves organizations time and money.

Conclusion
Traditionally, enterprise recovery solutions were deployed to protect server applications such as SQL Server, Exchange, Active Directory, Oracle, and Lotus Notes Domino. But as more and more enterprises realize that end-user systems are just as much a part of their mission-critical infrastructures, these solutions are starting to be viewed as essential for laptops and desktops.

Such solutions not only enhance system availability but they also help organizations ease their burden of complying with government regulations that require them to have the necessary internal controls in place to protect against risk events and ensure the integrity of their information. Given today's volatile IT environment, that makes them a must-have resource.

Tom Schmidt writes frequently about information security topics. He has more than 15 years' experience as a writer and editor in high-tech publishing.