Welcome to the first installation in a series of blogs that will detail 12 topics around disaster recovery technology – thus the DRT ;) These topics will cover industry trends, best practices, and relevant news on the topic that I feel you may also enjoy.
I’ll start with a brief introduction of myself. My name is Michael Krutikov, and I have been in the IT field for over 14 years; in sales, training, out in the field as a systems consultant and VAR account executive, in product management and now in marketing. Through a constant learning journey that is driven through thousands of meetings with partners and customers, my mission is to deliver solutions for customer’s problems, challenges and goals.
1) Virtualization is the reality; not only is it an increasingly popular way to run your IT, but it can and should save you money while improving functionality. It almost goes without saying that if you’re not using virtualization, you should evaluate it and test it, now. Solutions that incorporate virtualization can deliver disaster recovery for an entire IT environment as an additional benefit of the transition to a more virtualized infrastructure. Surprisingly, at this year’s VMWorld in San Francisco, there were quite a few people still encountering challenges in moving, or moving more of their IT, to virtualization. This was also echoed in the feedback I heard at the Chicago and Minneapolis ‘The New Rules of Backup & Data Protection with Jon Toigo’ seminars. Leverage advanced migration tools to solve for this.
2) Disaster Recovery (DR) is the dirty secret that too many organizations are pretending they don’t need to focus on (some are unfortunately choosing to ignore it entirely). This is even more evident in the small business space where 74% reported they don’t have a DR plan in place; leaving a huge disconnect between what they have and what they think they can live with. I’ll put it in another perspective – running your organization without a complete, and tested DR plan in place is like driving down the highway without a seatbelt or airbags… but then remove the doors, sheet metal, and windshield, and brakes.
3) Suffering a disaster once doesn’t prevent it from happening again. A disturbing result of having been hit with a disaster is that many don’t think it could happen again; and let’s not forget the businesses that didn’t re-open. When you look at those that have learned the lessons from experience, organizations in Florida, for example, have more experience with disasters to know it is a matter of time before another hurricane hits – but one year after the destruction from hurricane Sandy, many businesses in the US Northeast are no better prepared now. A recent article by Mark Koba, CNBC, highlights the problems here. http://www.nbcnews.com/business/year-after-sandy-businesses-unprepared-disaster-8C11439138.
Disaster Recovery is more than just a buzzword – it’s the difference between an organization existing or not. It may not seem easy to get a DR plan in place, but it will always be easier than not having one in place.
Look for part 2 in November...
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Update: Here is the link to DRT Dozen - part 2: Security, Bitcoin, and DR
