To ensure that your organization can get its applications up and running as rapidly as possible, Davoll suggests following these four best practices:

1. . Understand the recovery time and recovery point objectives you're committed to in your SLAs, and then go a step further and talk with end-users and company leaders about their true service level expectations. Success is about perception and much as results. Make sure your stakeholders know what to expect before building your recovery strategy.

2. . If all applications aren't the same, then the recovery of those assets shouldn't be the same either. Align your backup and recovery strategy for a given application with the criticality of that application to the business. The more critical the asset, the more quickly you need to be able to restore it.

3. . Group all relevant assets associated with a given application (servers, virtual machines, databases and so on) into an application group for which you can directly set and manage recovery SLAs. This will require data protection technology that allows administrators to organize, schedule, view, and manage backups based on applications rather than servers and infrastructure.