Many may see backup as the most important task in the data center, but remember we back up so that we may recover critical data, workloads and systems for various reasons. Ranging from disaster recovery to data reuse that enables business acceleration, needs differ from vertical to vertical. Recovery is the one thing that requires the flexibility to meet your specific needs with the reliability that you can recover with confidence when and where needed. The real question to ask is, “which data is most important to my business, and which recovery best meets our needs?” While there are many recovery methods available for many varied types of data, applications and systems — ultimately, you must choose which ones work best to achieve the recovery objectives that best meet your SLAs. 

For recovery, there are many options from which to choose that are specific to meeting the desired recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs): 

• Full system/disaster recovery — these requests are commonly served by full recovery, replica failover and bare-metal restore. 
• Database/application recovery — commonly recovered from using a combination of recovery software and built-in application tools, full system recovery or replica failover 
• Database/application-item recovery — common recovery types involve using capable backup software to recover the individual item directly or using legacy methods and tools to restore the entire application or database and then migrating the missing data back to production. 

• NAS/unstructured data recovery — these requests are most commonly met on an as-needed basis as restores can be lengthy due to using legacy NDMP dump-style backups that have strict recovery requirements. 
• Cloud data recovery — depending on how you are using the cloud, SaaS versus IaaS versus PaaS, common recovery methods can range from recycler/versioning to actually performing traditional recovery within IaaS in the same manner that you would use on premises. 

Instant Recovery is to have the ability to meet even the most challenging of RPOs — regardless of the data type or size. This is typically achieved with specialized backup software, Veeam® being the pioneer of this technology and process. With Instant Recovery, you can achieve your recovery objectives with ease, especially when you combine it with the power of virtualization: 

• Meet RTOs for critical assets, including VMs, applications, databases and NAS/unstructured data

• Better enable data reuse with data that is as close to production as possible
• Less downtime associated with recovery and migration operations is achieved via simultaneous Instant Recovery of multiple VMs