Picture this: You've just been involved in a minor car accident. Thankfully, you have car insurance, and while you hoped to never use it, it sits available at a moment’s notice. In the business world, that's the essence of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). It's like insurance for your critical data and applications: it might seem unnecessary at first, but when disaster strikes, you'll be grateful for the investment.
In the era of remote working cybersecurity risks, evolving IoT, increased cloud services, and revolving ransomware, businesses require reliable IT infrastructure to protect their data and ensure continuity of operations. According to Veeam's 2023 Trends In Data Protection report, 79% of IT leaders see a “Protection Gap” between tolerable data loss and how IT protects their data. Addressing this gap usually involves an upgrade of various disaster recovery services for production and protection. To tackle this concern, enterprises are better off subscribing to Disaster Recovery as-a-Service (DRaaS) rather than traditional disaster recovery solutions for cost efficiency, scalability, and reliability.
In the last few years, technology has continued to surge ahead, with many of these new developments taking cybersecurity to new heights. Unfortunately, the same technologies are being used by a growing number of hackers intent on monetizing your personal and professional data. This comes in the form of targeting both traditional and non-traditional devices such as edge devices and virtual cities.
It seems like we never have enough time to get everything done that we need to do during our time off. Before you know it, the weekend’s over and there’s still items left on our ‘to-do’ list. That’s certainly the way it is for enterprise backups. If you’re a backup administrator, you know the routine too well. Full and incremental backups take an enormous amount of time. They also consume a lot of resources and bandwidth. Because of their negative impact on production environments, we schedule backup jobs during off-peak hours. The problem is that window just never seems to be quite long enough and with burgeoning data repositories and an expanding application portfolio, that window seems to only get smaller. Face it, scheduling backups in the hope they complete in time without interfering with one another is stressful. Administrators can only hope the last backup job completes before users begin to trickle in Monday morning. If not, users will be competing with those same backup jobs for network bandwidth and server utilization resources and the help desk phones begin to ring.
Keeping up with the latest advances in IT technology is a task in and of itself. Once you add implementation and administering each new solution, it can become overwhelming. However, despite the hassle of upgrading, it’s a necessary to ensure that each part of your IT infrastructure is performing as optimally as possible.
As storage volumes continue to grow and enterprises make use of secondary storage to manage corporate data, they also need to backup these storage solutions. However, incorporating secondary storage into an enterprise-wide backup and recovery strategy is not always simple.
When it comes to pieces of the IT puzzle where skimping or going with the option that’s just ‘good enough’ will inevitably come back to haunt you, backup and disaster recovery tops the list.
WEI often works with clients in both areas of backup and disaster recovery at the same time. We find it’s often beneficial for them to be part of a single strategy since the function of backup and DR relates so closely together (recovering from some sort of event). They do have slightly different goals, however. With backup, you might be looking at a smaller data loss, such as accidental deletion or corruption of files.
Enterprises are increasingly realizing the value of their data, and are capturing as much of it as possible to glean whatever insights they can. The challenge, however, is that IT budgets are not growing at the rates needed to properly handle these growing mountains of digital gold.
In order for developers to keep up with the speed of business, new innovations in storage, backup, and disaster recovery are being rolled out at a breakneck pace. To stay competitive, enterprises must adopt these new methods and technologies for faster restores and greater opportunities to leverage the true value of data across their organization.
