Every IT director has seen the statistics about data loss and disaster recovery.
In a nutshell, lose access to critical data and apps for too long, and you’re at high risk of losing your business soon after. Yet when the time comes to actually plan, fund and implement a disaster recovery (DR) solution, those statistics go by the wayside. Instead, most companies approach disaster recovery with all the enthusiasm of a child taking medicine.
In their 2014 annual report entitled “The State of Global Disaster Recovery Preparedness,” the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council found that nearly three out of four companies (73%) were currently in danger of failing to recover from a disaster or outage. It’s not that companies aren’t doing anything about disaster recovery, or even that they’re not doing enough. They’re just not doing enough of the right things.
For example, most companies understand the importance of having an off-site DR solution. But they’ll frequently use older, legacy equipment for their off-site backup systems, which can be about as effective as an underinflated spare tire: it might help you a little, but it won’t get you very far. And while the rationale for using older equipment is to save money, it’s still very costly for an enterprise to try and replicate their storage area network (SAN), especially if they’re using different equipment to do it.
Other companies engage the help of a third-party service provider to host their DR system. The company buys the equipment, but the service provider manages it, which presumably includes some economy of scale in terms of leveraging the provider’s disaster recovery expertise. Here again, however, the company is still responsible for owning and updating their equipment.
Not long ago, CIOs would have shuddered at the idea of putting their DR solution in the Cloud. The Cloud wasn’t safe enough, reliable enough, accessible enough, so the initial thinking went. But Cloud services have evolved remarkably fast in a short span of time. Companies might not be comfortable putting their DR solution in the hands of an Amazon just yet, but many of them have no qualms about entrusting their DR to a provider like VMware, which offers Disaster Recovery as a Service through its vCloud Air platform.
One of the primary advantages of using vCloud Air for disaster recovery is its simplicity. Because many companies are already running their data center on vSphere, they can use that same technology to simply replicate their application, servers and even policies into vCloud Air. Voila, instant disaster recovery solution! (Well, launching a new DR solution in the Cloud can actually take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, but it’s still pretty fast.)
With vCloud Air’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), companies get a highly reliable, scalable and flexible platform for a low, fixed monthly cost that includes 30 days of free runtime and a full DR test each year. Of course, disaster recovery requires not just the right platform but the right planning, and that’s where Rolta AdvizeX comes in. We can help plan and prioritize your DR strategy by identifying what really is critical—and everything is critical until business users understand the costs—then assist with replication and sizing to make sure you have the right backup plan to cover your back.
At the time of this writing, we have several opportunities open to begin a free trial of vCloud Air’s Disaster Recovery as a Service solution. If you’d like to learn more or participate in a free trial, please contact our corporate headquarters at 216-901-1818. ▪