Why Disaster Recovery Matters For Business Survival In The Hybrid Cloud Era

Several weeks ago, I was vacationing in Florida just after Hurricane Milton made landfall and rendered millions without electricity, gasoline, phone service, or internet. These recent devastating storms are a stark reminder of the critical importance of disaster recovery (DR) in today's business landscape. An irony of modernization is that our increasing dependence on technology opens the door to more business disruption. While natural disasters have long been a primary driver for DR initiatives, the rise of ransomware attacks has exposed new vulnerabilities in our increasingly digital businesses. 

Disaster Recovery Is No Longer Hypothetical

The threat landscape has expanded beyond traditional concerns. In addition to natural disasters, businesses face risks from cyberattacks, power outages, and hardware failures. As the frequency and variety of potentially disruptive events increase, the likelihood of needing to rely on a DR solution becomes less of a hypothetical scenario and more of an inevitable reality. According to a 2021 survey, nearly one in three businesses experienced an outage over a two-year period, and 61% reported outages that cost them more than $100,000 at some point.* Disaster recovery is also a growing concern amid compliance requirements, as data loss can lead to financial and other penalties.  

Disaster Recovery Challenges

At the core of disaster recovery lies the critical ability to restore data. Data is both transformative and complex. Business leaders expect all data to always be available to foster new initiatives and projects. They want nearly everything to be retained because they see potential value in a greater array of data types. If you could simply store all data in a single cloud repository, that request would be easy enough. Unfortunately, there are many challenges:

• On-Premises Considerations: Despite the cloud trend, 37% of organizations still run data protection exclusively on-premises, and 47% for government organizations do the same.
• Regulatory Requirements: Some agencies mandate that data be kept in-house due to control capabilities and specific requirements. Others set minimum retention periods for certain types of data.
• Hybrid Complexity: Hybrid environments involve managing data and applications across both on-premises and cloud infrastructures, making DR planning and execution more complex.

According to the mentioned study, 28% of survey respondents identified meeting disaster recovery requirements as a challenge. Only data capacity and growth were of greater concern. DR is a growing challenge in the era of transformational digital data.  

Businesses Turn To Hybrid DR

Hybrid computing introduces significant complexities to DR strategies:

• Organizations must carefully balance on-premises and cloud-based solutions to meet their DR needs.
• Managing complex storage implementations across different environments becomes a challenging task often requiring specialized skills and tools.
• Ensuring the security and availability of critical data across multiple locations demands a comprehensive approach to data protection and access control.

Organizations can no longer rely on traditional on-prem DR solutions. That is why they are turning to more modernized solutions, according to a recent study:

• 63% of organizations are using cloud services for data protection.
• 41% use a hybrid cloud deployment for data protection.
• 22% exclusively use cloud-based backup services like DRaaS.

Greater Flexibility And Enhanced Resilience

In the same way hybrid has transformed enterprises, it is now changing the game for DR. The shift to hybrid DR is not just about saving time and money. It is about making your whole system more resilient. Since most companies already use both on-site and off-site infrastructure, being able to keep data in multiple places just makes sense. 

One of the keys to hybrid DR is Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI). HCI provides a common management plane across hybrid cloud environments and can help to minimize the outages related to hardware and software failures through its standardized architecture. Some HCI platforms, such as Nutanix, offer multiple snapshot types for greater flexibility in disaster recovery strategies. Nutanix provides two main types of snapshots:

• Full Snapshots: Used for asynchronous replication when RPO is 60 minutes or greater, keeping system resource usage low for extended periods with multiple snapshots.
• Lightweight Snapshots (LWS): Used for NearSync replication with RPO between 1-15 minutes, reducing metadata overhead and improving storage performance by decreasing I/O operations from long snapshot chains.

This flexibility is particularly valuable as enterprises increasingly seek to minimize their RPO and RTO times, where RPO measures the interval between backups and RTO measures the time between an outage and data recovery. The inherent flexibility of the Nutanix architecture is also evident in its distributed processing capabilities as well:

• Each node has its own virtual storage controller and access to local metadata.
• This design allows replication to scale along with the system because as you add more nodes, you add more processing power for replication.
• Every node participates in the replication process, which helps prevent performance hotspots in the cluster.
• Nutanix is designed to easily stretch between on-prem and the cloud, providing an approach where you can move data and workloads around as needed.  By having your Nutanix infrastructure configured in this fashion allows for a simple to use and cohesive platform that can protect your data and also orchestrate the recovery shall the need arise.   

This distributed approach allows for better scalability and performance compared to traditional systems that might have centralized bottlenecks or rely on specialized hardware.

Watch: Achieve A Game Winning Strategy With WEI & Nutanix

Final Thoughts

Nutanix leverages hybrid cloud environments to provide deeper resiliency and flexibility in data retention across multiple locations. Businesses that have embraced their approach have experienced numerous benefits in the DR efforts including:

• Elastic scaling
• Efficient snapshot management
• Simplified hybrid deployment
• Improved recovery times
• Integrated ransomware protection

As part of the Nutanix Elite Partner ecosystem, WEI can deliver a comprehensive disaster recovery solution tailored to your hybrid enterprise needs. Our innovative approach leverages Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) to seamlessly integrate on-premises and cloud environments that provides the resiliency and flexibility you need to ensure that your DR strategy aligns with both your infrastructure requirements and business objectives. 

Next Steps: A leading federal credit union faced aging infrastructure, rising costs, and scalability challenges that jeopardized the reliability of its critical systems. To modernize its IT environment, they partnered with WEI to deploy a Nutanix-based hyperconverged solution, replacing outdated hardware and ensuring future growth with enhanced disaster recovery capabilities. Download the full case study and learn how WEI can transform your IT infrastructure!

*Source: 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Data Management and Disaster Recovery 2021