Backup Assure: A Disaster Recovery Case Study

It's the worst nightmare of any network administrator: a major component of your network fails and you don't have a backup.

Cisco ISE and Catalyst Center are critical for any network - having backups that are easy to restore when disaster strikes is key: Backup Assure is the answer.

Backup Assure - A Disaster Recovery Case Study

Recommending a backup solution is more than just a technical decision, it's a choice that can define a customer's business continuity strategy for years.

Last week, one of our customers faced the ultimate test of that choice.

And the backup solution we recommended saved them $20,000-60,000 in downtime costs.

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The Disaster: Total Infrastructure Failure

In this blog we're going to work through a real world scenario to show how Backup Assure can protect your network.

One of our customers experienced a recent catastrophic VMware infrastructure failure. Not a single VM corruption. Not a minor outage. Total platform failure.

Multiple virtual machines corrupted and wouldn't boot. Recovery tools failed. The team scrambled to convert VMware virtual disks to Hyper-V format, attempting to salvage critical infrastructure on different platforms.

Critical services down:

Cisco ISE Cluster: No Wi-Fi authentication. No secure network access. Employees locked out.
Catalyst Center: No network visibility. No management capability. No automation.

Production halted and every minute counted.

The backup challenge:

Their Backup Assure appliance was also running on VMware. When they tried to boot it on
Hyper-V, it wouldn't start - wrong drivers, wrong platform.

This is where most backup solutions become part of the problem instead of the solution - let's take a look at how we recovered this catastrophic event.

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The Recovery: 4 Hours, Start to Finish

We engaged Backup Assure support on behalf of our customer. What happened next validated every reason we recommend this product:

Hour 1: Immediate Response

Called Backup Assure support
Connected with senior engineer immediately (no ticket queue, no escalation delays)
Engineer understood the environment, the disaster, and the urgency
Fresh Hyper-V version of Backup Assure deployed within minutes

Hour 2: Guided Migration

Backup Assure engineer walked our customer's team through converting backup
repositories from VMware to Hyper-V format
Step-by-step guidance on attaching converted data to new platform
Real-time troubleshooting as they worked

Hour 3: Validation

Used Backup Assure's built-in validation tools
Confirmed every backup intact despite infrastructure disaster
No corruption. No data loss.
Knew with certainty they could restore before attempting it

Hour 4: Full Restoration

ISE cluster restored from validated backups
Catalyst Center restored and functional
Wi-Fi authentication back online
Network management capability restored
Production resumed

Total time from disaster to full recovery: 4 hours.

Our customer's Hyper-V administrator said it multiple times during the support call: "We never would have worked this out without you."

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The Backup Assure ROI

Conservative estimate of downtime costs:

Network downtime industry average: $5,000-15,000 per hour
4-hour downtime with Backup Assure: $20,000-60,000

Without validated, accessible backups:

Rebuilding ISE from scratch: 8-16 hours
Reconfiguring Catalyst Center: 8-12 hours
Testing and validation: 4-8 hours
Potential downtime: 20-36+ hours
Potential cost: $100,000-540,000

Our recommendation of Backup Assure saved this customer $80,000-480,000 in a
single incident.

But the real value goes beyond dollars:

No explaining to leadership why backups were corrupt
No panic searching for scattered backup files
No career-limiting "we can't recover" conversation
Confidence during crisis

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