Blog

Backup Assure: A Disaster Recovery Case Study

Written by IPTel Solutions | 28 January 2026 6:01:42 AM

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.

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.

ASSOCIATED BLOGS:

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.

ASSOCIATED BLOGS:

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."

ASSOCIATED BLOGS:

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

ASSOCIATED BLOGS:

Backup Assure: A Disaster Recovery Case Study: Summary

In this blog, we have let you have the insight into a major failure. These can be truly heart stopping events for any network administrator and the difference between inconvenience and losing your job might well be the ability to return your network to service quickly!

Any company running a network needs to have a strategy for how to support that network and keep it operational. Backing up and restoring key servers and devices is a major component - and on this you have to trust your vendor.

We have worked with Backup Assure and seen this first hand: when trouble strikes you need Backup Assure in your corner.

Drop us a line if you'd like to chat more on our Contact Us page.

 
View full post