Most organizations find their resilience gaps by accident: during a capacity project, a failed restore or, worst of all, a real disaster. Our latest webinar was about finding them on purpose.
Nikolay Petrov, General Manager at Tiger Technology, and Nikolay Fesliyski, Product Manager for Tiger Bridge, hosted Core Strategies for Data Resilience in Mission-Critical Environments. They deleted a protected file server live, then recovered it, and answered the questions IT teams have when they design disaster recovery.
Lesson 1: Audit all four pillars, especially the one nobody tests
The webinar framed data resilience around four pillars. Most teams have invested in the first three. The fourth, recoverability, is the one most often assumed rather than proven. Use the questions below as a quick self-audit:
| Pillar | What it means | Ask yourself |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Users and applications get their data at the performance they need | If our storage filled up tomorrow, would performance degrade before anyone noticed? |
| Integrity | Data stays healthy, intact and free of silent corruption | Could we roll a single file back to the version before it was corrupted or encrypted? |
| Security | Only authorized people can reach the data | Do our backups sit on the same network, with the same credentials, as production? |
| Recoverability | Data can be brought back to a healthy state after an unpredictable event | When did we last restore a full folder or server, and how long did it actually take? |
If the last question has no confident answer, your recovery plan is a hypothesis. Lesson 3 shows what a tested one looks like.
Lesson 2: Your biggest resilience gap may be hiding behind a capacity problem
An engineering firm in the UAE came to us with what looked like a storage problem. Every few months the team deleted files and bought more hardware, and performance dropped as disks filled up.
The real exposure sat underneath. Production and backup lived in the same building, on the same network. One fire, flood, array failure or ransomware attack would have taken out both at once. That setup breaks the most overlooked part of the 3-2-1 rule: two copies in one location effectively count as one.
Tiger Bridge was installed on the firm's existing servers. No new hardware, and engineers kept saving and opening files exactly as before. One deployment addressed every pillar:
- Availability: frequently used files stayed local as cache, so performance improved, while inactive data moved to the cloud and freed capacity.
- Integrity and recoverability: every file gained versions in the cloud, so users can step back to a clean copy after encryption or corruption.
- Site loss: an offsite cloud copy removed the single point of failure and gave the firm low RPO and RTO.
The firm started a capacity project and ended up with a disaster recovery strategy. If your team is fighting full disks today, ask the same question they eventually did: where is our second copy, physically?
Lesson 3: Recovery speed depends on what you restore first
Choosing a DR architecture is half the work. The other half is the decision an administrator makes in the first minutes of a recovery: what to bring back, and in what order. The live demo tested the toughest scenario, a recovery with no standby server at all.
The setup was simple: a folder protected by Tiger Bridge and replicated to Microsoft Azure. To simulate a disaster, the folder was disconnected from Tiger Bridge and every local file deleted. A fresh server was then pointed at the same Azure container.
Tiger Bridge recognized that the container already held data and offered four ways to bring it back:
| Recovery option | What happens | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Import on demand | Stub files are created only for folders users open, as they open them | Large file systems where people need to work immediately |
| Import all metadata | Stub files are created for the entire file system up front | Smaller datasets, or when the full tree must be visible at once |
| Restore all data | Full file contents are copied back on-premises | Rare cases that need every byte local, at the cost of time and capacity |
| No action | The folder is linked to the container and actions are triggered manually | Controlled, file-by-file recovery |
With import on demand selected, the folder structure appeared within seconds. Opening a folder populated its files. A video stored in the hot tier played back immediately, as if nothing had happened. Files in the archive tier stayed listed and available to rehydrate when needed.
The principle behind it: users get back to work while the rest of the file system stays safely in the cloud until someone needs it. Tiger Bridge also pulls only the parts of a file an application requests, which cuts time to first byte even on a standard internet connection.
Lesson 4: The small details decide whether a DR design survives real life
The audience Q&A covered the practical questions that make or break a disaster recovery project.
Will a second or third DR site multiply my costs? No. Tiger Bridge is licensed per unique data under management, so adding locations does not double or triple the license. Pay-as-you-go plans bill monthly per gigabyte, and reserved capacity plans bill annually per terabyte. See plans and pricing.
Who holds the data? You do. Data lives in your own cloud tenant, with the provider of your choice. Tiger Bridge is cloud agnostic and can replicate the same source to more than one cloud for an extra independent copy.
How far apart can the primary and DR sites be? As far as you like. Replication runs through the cloud, so no dedicated link between sites is needed. Customers with two offices often replicate each one to the other, turning two sites into two DR locations without building a third.
Can Tiger Bridge replace a traditional backup stack? One attendee runs scheduled backup to tape and Azure Blob from Windows Server storage. Yes. Tiger Bridge can replicate to tape as well as to cloud, so a mixed tape and Azure setup can move to continuous protection without abandoning either target.
Should we keep NTFS deduplication on? We recommend disabling it and using Tiger Bridge's space reclamation policy instead, which is more efficient alongside tiering.
Test your recovery before a disaster does
Infrastructure decisions made today need to hold for the next five years, through events no one can predict. The common thread across all four lessons is simple: resilience you have tested reduces risk, and resilience you have assumed only postpones it.
The full session, including the live recovery demo, is available on the webinar page.
Ready to find your own blind spots? Book a personalized demo and we will walk through a recovery on a setup like yours, or start a free 30-day trial and run the test yourself.
This post is the third in our data resilience series. Core Strategies for Data Resilience: A Practical Guide covers how to set RPO and RTO targets. Hybrid Cloud Disaster Recovery: Choosing the Right Infrastructure Model covers which standby setup to maintain.