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Driving Predictable Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

AlexSakaguchi
Level 2
Employee

Disaster recovery in the cloud is a hot topic for many organizations. I’ve talked with IT executives that find it exciting, because it promises cost-effective, on-demand infrastructure, but also daunting, because they’re not sure how to make it work – especially with the mix of legacy and new workloads that currently serve the business.

At Vision 2017, I spoke with two Veritas experts on this topic: Ralph Wynn, Product Manager and Ian Wood, Customer Advocate and Solutions Sales for EMEA. We discussed what is fueling interest in disaster recovery in the cloud and how Veritas is helping organizations get there.  Listen to our full conversation in EP17: Disaster Recovery in a Cloud Environment

I started off by asking Ralph and Ian why organizations are so interested in cloud and disaster recovery. “It’s really about having always-on access to the cloud,” said Ralph. “They can immediately utilize the cloud instances, like what AWS or Azure provide, as a target if they have a failure. Since the cloud is always on, they don’t have to worry about making phone calls to get a system back online or hope and pray their recovery process actually works.”

Ian added, “Organizations are looking for two things when it comes to disaster recovery in the cloud. First, they want to reduce the cost of disaster recovery, and second, they realize that the application landscape is really complex right now with loads of dependencies. That complexity demands a paradigm shift in disaster recovery that can cope with these new workloads and reliably leverage the cloud.”

Earlier that day, I heard in an analyst meeting that organizations normally run recovery tests on their physical data center setups just once or twice a year − at the most.  In certain scenarios, though, the cloud facilitates running disaster recovery tests using whatever timeframe they choose.  This has some striking benefits including helping IT leaders feel confident that their disaster recovery processes will actually work when needed, and they can proactively assess the cost factors for spinning up a secondary site – including for permanent migrations.

Doing these types of migrations can be difficult, however.  I asked Ralph to explain Veritas’ approach to alleviating some of that complexity. “That’s a good question, because it’s not all resolved by software,” explained Ralph. “We actually combine services with software to add the human element of analyzing the customer’s issues and recommending an appropriate course of action. From there, we use software to customize their recovery plan so they can get to the cloud more effectively.”

 

VRP blog DR.png“Yes,” added Ian. “Disaster recovery is definitely not a one-size-fits-all for every application – it just wouldn’t make sense. Each application will have its own SLA for recovery times and point objectives, and there are also interdependencies to take into account. Those unique factors really require a service engagement.”

Considering that, on average, enterprises have at least three different infrastructure-as-a-service providers as part of their IT environments, we discussed how disaster recovery works when multiple clouds are involved.  Ian noted that he often asks customers if they have an “un-cloud” strategy or a plan for moving their workloads around – possibly to different providers. “Un-clouding really drives the whole orchestration to move a workload away from the cloud to another provider or even back on premise,” explained Ian. “Veritas Resiliency Platform helps facilitate the mobility of organizations’ applications and data between multiple different cloud platforms and providers.”

Veritas Resiliency Platform is one of the key pieces of our 360 Data Management initiative that’s designed to ensure application resiliency across constantly evolving and heterogeneous environments. It also integrates with the Veritas data protection platform.

To learn more about Resiliency Platform, visit https://www.veritas.com/product/business-continuity/resiliency-platform

Listen to the Podcast
Visit iTunes to listen to this ‘Voice of Veritas’ podcast, EP17: Disaster Recovery in a Cloud Environment, for more information about how to achieve proactive disaster recovery in the cloud with predictable resiliency every time.

Subscribe to the Voice of Veritas podcast to get the newest episodes as they’re released.