Top Five Qualities of a Good Backup Solution for Windows Server 2016

The time has come, and you are ready to migrate to Windows Server 2016. As part of your migration process, you will back up your old server, and then perform an upgrade according to Microsoft recommendations. Good plan, no doubt – but there is one question – will your backup solution cope with your plan? Does it actually support the new Windows Server?

Unfortunately, a number of backup solution vendors are lagging behind when it comes to supporting the latest versions of operating systems. If your company has an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, you may be under increased pressure to upgrade as soon as possible, especially if Microsoft is planning apply the Modern Lifecycle Policy to the Windows Server product line that you use.

If you are in a market for a new backup solution for Windows Server 2016, here are the top five qualities you need to look for.

Windows Server 2016 will allow you to do more – more workloads, data, and applications. At the same time, your backup windows, recovery time objectives (RTO), and recovery point objectives (RPOs) will have to shrink. Quadruple growth of data in three years is a reality – but quadruple growth of your budget and computing resources won’t happen any time soon. You need to look for a solution that will use all available resources at the highest efficiency. In short, you need the fastest backup solution for Windows Server 2016 available on the market.

The need to perform more tasks with the same resources applies not only to your server – but to you and your IT team as well. The time you can dedicate to managing a backup solution is dwindling so rapidly, that it may almost disappear altogether very soon. Gone are the times when you could spend hours and days writing scripts and managing complex interfaces. Now you need a solution that you can access from your tablet on the go, and manage backup and data protection for your Windows Server 2016, and your entire company, remotely.

Your IT infrastructure diversifies faster than you can imagine. Ten years ago, you had one device per user, now you have more than three. Previously you cared only for single servers.  Now you need to protect a lot: physical servers, virtual machines and hosts, cloud instances, PCs, Mac computers, and even the tablet of your CEO. You cannot afford to use a solution that backs up only one platform, like Hyper-V — you simply do not have time to implement five different backup solutions for five different types of platforms. Moreover, when it comes to Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V, you need a solution that supports its new functionality, like the resilient change tracking (RCT), out-of-the-box. In addition, beyond backup you need replication, migration, rapid-RTO recovery technologies, and more. In short, you need a single backup solution that contains the most features, protects the most types of platforms, and delivers everything you need and when you need it.

Your applications have complex structure of access rights, privileges, and overall security. Your Windows Server 2016 Active Directory helps you with authentication and authorization of users and devices. But, your complete backups contain all the sensitive information from every department you protect – including customer data, finance, legal, HR and other departments’ databases. Your backup solution should have through-and-through security at its core, including at-source strong encryption, password protection, compliance, and reliable physical security for cloud data centers, where you store your backups off-site for disaster recovery purposes.

Your backup solution needs to protect all your systems and all your data, support any storage, and any application. It means that your backup solution vendor should have a proven track record of deep knowledge of operating systems (including new ones), databases and data structures, storage devices and protocols, application integration, and more.

In its essence, your backup solution vendor should have a combined knowledge of the entire IT industry! Only such depth of knowledge would allow the vendor to support new operating systems, like Windows Server 2016, quickly – being the first in the market. There can be only one first – and it is Acronis.

Acronis is the first to support backup of Windows Server 2016 and deliver the world’s fastest, easiest, most complete, safest, and proven backup solution.

Try it for yourself. Check out Acronis Backup 12 today and experience the industry's best backup and data protection for Windows Server 2016.

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