The impact of cloud-native disaster recovery
Enterprises continue to turn to the cloud for backing up data and hosting virtual machines. Once in the cloud, however, virtual machines still need to be protected. After all, accidents can happen in the cloud, too, and anything from an accidental deletion to ransomware can compromise your cloud-based VMs.
This is why it’s necessary to have a strong disaster recovery plan that covers not only your mission-critical on-premises VMs, but also VMs running in the cloud, such as with VMware Cloud on AWS. One that is integrated into your overall data protection plan that leverages the cost and computing advantages of the cloud.
Making the business case for cloud-native disaster recovery
Historically, disaster recovery included dedicated data centers standing at the ready for failover in the event of disasters. It was the most expensive and complex option for DR, which only the biggest companies could afford, and only for the most mission critical applications. This left most business and applications vulnerable, hoping that disaster didn’t strike.
The emergence of SaaS data protection has enabled cloud-native disaster recovery at a fraction of the cost of legacy DR solutions. Cloud-native disaster recovery offers clear advantages to customers using cloud-based data protection solutions such as:
- Lower cost as SaaS subscription models replace dedicated hardware
- Expanded DR coverage for applications / workloads
- Ability to recover VMs in the cloud within minutes
- Workload mobility across cloud regions
It’s clear that reducing the cost of disaster recovery, making it simpler and more scalable, and guaranteeing RTO / RPO objectives has clear advantages over legacy solutions. However, it’s also important to consider the implications of NOT planning for disaster. In the US alone, the cost of downtime from disasters can be as high as $4M, and in many cases, small to medium size businesses will never recover from a major disaster. The impact of downtime to your business needs to be factored into your DR planning.
Closing thoughts/recommendations
Given the availability of low-cost, on-demand disaster-recovery solutions, it’s surprising that DR is still often an afterthought. The need to act is clear. At a minimum, basic DR planning needs to happen immediately, and choosing the right technology is key. Given the advantages, including low cost,using emerging best practices and technology is a no-brainer.
Learn more
If you would like to learn more about whether cloud disaster-recovery is right for you, listen into this on-demand webinar with GigaOm and Druva, where the current trends, benefits and best practices are discussed. You can find out more about Druva’s disaster recovery solutions as well.
About the Analyst
David Linthicum is a CTO and an internationally renowned thought leader in cloud computing. David has spent the last 25 years leading, showing, and teaching large global enterprise organizations across all industries how to use technology resources more productively and constantly innovate. All of David’s opinions are his own.
About GigaOm Research
GigaOm provides technical, operational, and business advice for IT’s strategic digital enterprise and business initiatives. Enterprise business leaders, CIOs, and technology organizations partner with GigaOm for practical, actionable, strategic, and visionary advice for modernizing and transforming their business. GigaOm’s advice empowers enterprises to successfully compete in an increasingly complicated business atmosphere that requires a solid understanding of constantly changing customer demands.