It’s no surprise that in our hyper-competitive economy, nearly every company in the world has some form of backup in place. What’s interesting, however, is the cloud-based approach many take to disaster recovery (DR) given the wide variety of outages that arguably require different methods of recovery. For example, it’s often much more efficient to use on-site DR for single-system issues such as an OS crash or hardware failure (which cause 45% of all IT outages), where jumping off-site would be akin to visiting the emergency room for a papercut. On the flip side, wide-area disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and fires, require an off-site approach. So, what’s best for your business? Perhaps the best of both worlds: hybrid DR.
Versatility is no longer a “nice to have”
It’s clear the move to cloud for backup and DR isn’t going away, with Gartner predicting that 80% of enterprises will close their traditional data centers by 2025. That said, there’s been a noticeable wave of cloud repatriation, supported by an IDC survey which found many companies have plans to return to traditional on-premises, non-cloud environments, or to an on-premises private cloud or hosted private cloud.
These findings are consistent with our study that suggests the growing need for a more versatile DR strategy. According to a recent independent survey of 759 global IT decision makers, we found the most commonly used backup method is still disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C), yet 45% plan to deploy cloud for some or most of their data in the next year. Essentially, companies aren’t moving to the cloud just because they think they need to be there. Rather, they’re looking to move when it makes the most sense to do so. In short, they’re looking to deploy a hybrid approach to DR.
What’s stopping them?
If it’s evident that hybrid DR is the most versatile strategy, you may be wondering why most companies don’t implement it across their IT infrastructures. Two reasons: it’s often highly expensive and extraordinarily complex to do it yourself.
Take, for example, the typical modern infrastructure which consists of mission-critical, business-critical, and secondary data and systems on every conceivable storage imaginable. Each tier requires a different level of application availability ranging from real-time replication to long-term retention. But if you consider just the systems that require DR, you’re still looking – in most cases – at a disjointed set of tools that ultimately form a risky patching system and multiple points of failure.
Now, add in the other tiers and you’d need at least 10 tools and vendors:
- DR software
- DR server/storage for spinning up VMs
- DR hypervisor
- DRaaS vendor/platform
- Backup software
- Backup storage
- BaaS vendor/platform
- High Availability (HA) software
- HA Replica server hardware vendor
- HA Replica hypervisor
- More?
The reality is most companies cannot afford, nor do they have the in-house expertise, to build a holistic strategy, let alone one that incorporates both on-site and off-site DR.
Simplifying at scale: on-appliance backup and disaster recovery now available
We were recently told by one of our analyst friends that now, more than ever, companies need an easier transition to cloud; one that doesn’t require a DIY project that so often leaves them exposed to risk while making DR much costlier (and unpredictable) than it needs to be. Going straight to public cloud can be unexpectedly expensive despite the relative low cost of storage, and often doesn’t provide the robust SLAs required for mission- and business-critical systems. Yet, the benefits of cloud-based DR cannot be denied.
So, what if you could bundle backup for secondary data and systems, DR for business-critical systems, and high availability for mission-critical systems with replication to public and private clouds? An intermediary step between fully on-premises and pure SaaS? A solution that’s truly plug-and-play with a single point of contact for hardware, software and cloud services? It would look something like this:
We’re proud to introduce our newest appliances, the Arcserve 9000 Series, designed for disaster recovery and backed by the world’s number one hardware provider with high redundancy for ultimate reliability. The first backup and DR appliance of its kind, it allows you to spin up copies of physical and virtual systems directly on the appliance and in private/public/Arcserve clouds. With on-site support in as little as four hours and effective capacity of up to 504TBs, it doesn’t get better than this! Find out more here!
