"Organizations have to be strategic about the way they go about setting their application recovery objectives," he says. "One-size-fits-all recovery simply isn't an option."

Second, infrastructure is fluid. With the combination of physical, virtual and cloud environments that is the reality for many organizations today, application assets may not be living together in the same place within the underlying infrastructure.

"Some application assets may reside on a physical server, while some may reside on a virtual machine," Davoll says. "Some assets may even reside off-premise. If you're backing up with a traditional server-centric approach, truly restoring the application now requires searching multiple backups, in multiple locations, for all of the necessary components. This can be a time-consuming process, and when it comes to application recovery, time is not your friend."

Third, most strategies require a two-step and two-person restore.

"In most cases, the backup admin needs to restore the image of the data, and from there, the application administrator needs to reconfigure the underlying application," he says. "When you're fighting against the clock to meet stringent user expectations, a two-step, two-person process is never ideal."