Easily manage SaaS-based disaster recovery (DR) on a global, scalable hybrid cloud platform alongside all your other cloud services with HPE GreenLake.
– Guest blog post by Johnny Yu, Research Manager, Storage and Computing Infrastructure Software Platforms, IDC
DR is one of the many responsibilities to which IT administrators must devote their efforts, and ensuring every mission-critical and business-critical application can run – even in the event of a natural disaster or cyberattack – is no small task. Organizations typically must provide very detailed plans on how to execute DR, with playbooks for different disaster scenarios and charts depicting the level of involvement and responsibility for individuals within the organization. Then, they must periodically test and update those plans.
Yet, IDC survey data found most companies don't test their DR all that often: 37.7 percent of respondents said they test quarterly or more often, but 33.9 percent said they only test twice a year. This left 28.4 percent of respondents who test even less frequently than that.
DR testing has multiple benefits. At the very least, it lets organizations confirm their DR setup works before an actual disaster occurs. Testing also reveals how well the current DR system is working. With DR, it's not enough to simply recover everything – critical applications need to be restored quickly to minimize lost business due to downtime. When companies know how well (or poorly) they are meeting recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs), they can then take steps to streamline or improve their DR processes.
But as an organization’s infrastructure becomes more dispersed and complex, DR testing may fall by the wayside. Applications can be running on premises, in the cloud, or on containers, and the DR methods for each can differ significantly. On a large scale, managing all the various DR implementations becomes a time-consuming part of the overall DR process, demanding more administrative bandwidth. This can become a bottleneck to scaling DR operations – as a business grows, it inevitably deploys new sites and applications that will need DR.
Freeing up bandwidth
Traditionally, businesses have turned to SaaS to reduce both cost and management overhead. For example, companies commonly use SaaS-based email, which reduces cost by saving businesses from having to purchase, power, cool, and maintain physical servers dedicated to company email. It reduces management overhead by eliminating the need to periodically take the email system down to push out a software update or roll out updates in a testing environment first to ensure they are compatible with on-premises hardware.
SaaS-based DR can deliver similar benefits. Having a single, unified, cloud-based application that can see every DR implementation across the entire organization will make administrators' jobs much easier. They can also monitor and schedule tests for each DR deployment, establishing a regular testing cadence. As with all SaaS products, SaaS-based DR delivers automated updates and patches to the DR software and typically has a lower barrier of entry with simple and predictable pricing. Finally, SaaS provides an extra layer of security: Since the software itself isn't hosted in a company's datacenter, malicious attackers who have infiltrated an organization's systems won't easily reach the DR control plane.
SaaS-based DR is different from disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS). Part of the benefits of paying a DRaaS subscription is the provider will take care of an organization's DR management, testing, and even incident response in some cases. This can be viewed as the best way to reduce administrative overhead when it comes to DR.
DRaaS is the best solution for companies solely focused on lowering administrative overhead, but it's a step too far for others. Most aspects of DR are in the provider's hands, and not all providers are flexible enough to accommodate every specific storage or regulatory need. SaaS-based DR allows businesses to reap the benefits of cloud-based software while still retaining full management control. Minimal administrative bandwidth is spent on maintaining the software itself, allowing IT organizations to focus on DR management.
Consider implementing SaaS-based DR
DR management at scale is a significant challenge for organizations looking to grow, expand, and adopt new applications and technologies. Administrative bandwidth becomes the choke point for ensuring DR deployments are properly tested and maintained. This leads to lower general resilience hygiene as testing becomes less frequent, DR plans aren't updated, and recovery times take longer.
IDC believes this challenge is endemic to any growing organization, as IT administrators inevitably shoulder more and more burdens with each new site or application deployment. Therefore, in a climate where companies are asked to do more with less, we believe any technology that can significantly lower administrative bandwidth consumption deserves consideration.
Meet guest blogger Johnny Yu, IDC
Blog post sponsored by HPE
HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery provides SaaS-based DR on a global, scalable cloud platform at an affordable price. It reduces data loss and downtime using Zerto technology, with unique multi-site management from the dashboard. This allows organizations to see they are meeting SLAs and getting RPOs of just seconds and RTOs of a few minutes across multiple data centers for seamless data protection. Easy point-and-click provisioning, plus built-in orchestration and automation simplifies testing DR strategies more often. Now companies of all sizes can protect their most mission-critical assets with an affordable subscription model and a free 90-day trial offer.
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