Good backups mean that when the CEO accidentally deletes an important e-mail, or a developer deletes an entire server by mistake, there’s no need to panic – things can be restored. But it’s always been at the cost of substantial time and effort, says Veeam South Africa regional corporate account manager Warren Olivier – until now.
“The enhanced 1-click restore feature in Veeam Backup & Replication 7 makes it quicker and easy for users to restore anything from a single e-mail to an entire server themselves,” he says. “That’s more efficient and less expensive for the organisation, and quicker and more satisfying for the user. Everybody wins.”
Of course, adds Olivier, IT managers will want to keep control of who can restore what, and when – and he says 1-click restore offers the ability for very fine-grained permissions. “As the administrator you can empower individuals with exactly what they need to get the restore job done, and no more.”
Confidentiality is one major benefit, he says.
“Typically, if the CEO accidentally deletes an entire e-mail, the backup administrator will need to read through multiple e-mails to find the right one to restore. That’s obviously a problem from a security and confidentiality perspective. But now Veeam Backup & Replication offers several different options for restoring the lost file.”
One way, says Olivier, is to use the software’s vPower feature to restore the virtual machine housing the Exchange server, “then generate a web access link and send it to the CEO or his admin person to do the restore themselves.
Or, if they are not concerned with somebody reading through their e-mails, we could instantly restore in under two minutes using our Exchange Explorer to mount the mailbox, browse the e-mails and find the one to restore. Finally, we have also created the ability for end users to restore a file without necessarily being able to read the contents or having any permissions in the virtual infrastructure.”
This give organisations a choice, he says: “Tech-savvy CEOs can do it for themselves in a few seconds, or the help desk can do it without compromising confidentiality. Either way, it’s a more satisfying outcome.”
Similarly, says Olivier, administrators can now give development special recovery permissions. “Developers are always deleting this. If they need to request a restore from the help desk, it could take hours which are then wasted. It’s much more efficient if they can do it themselves – provided you can do it safely, which is what Veeam Backup & Replication 7 offers. There’s no chance of breaking or overwriting anything.”
As well as faster recovery and increased confidentiality, the new technology also enables organisations to make better use of help desk resources, says Olivier.
“The more users can do for themselves, the better. This is a great move for large enterprises that want to be able to tier their help desk operations. What was Tier 1 becomes something users can do for themselves, so Tier 2 becomes Tier 1 and so on. It makes things more efficient all the way along the chain.”