Organizations now operate in a world where employees and customers alike expect critical services to be available and accessible at all times, and it’s forcing IT to rethink the way it approaches backup and recovery.

According to the results of a new Quest Software survey of more than 200 IT professionals in North America, nearly three-quarters of organizations now rank restoring critical applications alongside recovering lost data as their top backup and recovery concern.

Problematically, traditional data protection solutions require organizations to build recovery objectives based on servers and infrastructure, with little focus on the recoverability of the underlying applications that drive business activity.

As a result, only 5 percent of organizations surveyed indicated that they build their recovery objectives strictly around applications.

Ken Kearley, corporate applications manager, Florida College, comments: “Not only have end users become more and more dependent on the services that IT provides, but their expectations for availability and continuity are more demanding than ever before, as well. When a service goes down, today’s end users expect it to be restored immediately, and it’s imperative that we in IT can meet that expectation."

"That’s why it’s so important, especially when you’re running a virtual environment, to have application-aware backup technology that enables you to not only drill down and perform fast, granular restores, but also to get those virtual applications back up and running quickly,” Kearley added.