Beyond Catastrophe: Disaster Recovery's Evolution Into Managed Availability Services
By Lee Exall, Managing Director, Capital Continuity
The word disaster conjures up images of chaos and calamity, an event so huge that it changes the very structure of the environment it impacts. Acts of God, terrorism, system grid failures — these are the types of unforeseen things that affect whole communities and cause untold damages.
In business, a disastrous event can grind operations to a halt and threaten the infrastructure of the enterprise itself. If a business loses its core data or access to vital applications, it may not survive long enough to rebuild.
Enter traditional disaster recovery. The first iteration of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) was a way to insure against the worst of crises that caused large-scale outages and massive losses of data. There will always be a place for these services; businesses can’t afford that kind of operational blow. However, disaster recovery technology has evolved; the term itself is misleading since today’s DRaaS offerings are all about maintaining continuity in everyday operations.
As enterprise becomes increasingly dependent on Internet-based technologies and applications, even non-disaster interruptions can cause lost productivity and lost profits. In a world in which people are always connected and have come to expect instantaneous response from the systems with which they work, any outage throws operations off kilter. Recent outages at cloud providers like Google Compute Engine, Amazon Web Services, and Azure provide real world examples of the impact that even short-term outages can have on business continuity.
These days, businesses need to ensure continuity of their day-to-day operations to keep their employees productive and their customers connected. Interruptions and issues with business-critical applications and systems should be addressed as they happen to eliminate any threats to smooth operations. Rapid response is critical. If there’s a disruption in your service, your brand and bottom line suffer. Every moment your operations are stalled is a moment of lost profitability.
The rise of cloud technology has fundamentally changed the level of service managed services providers (MSPs) can provide, but many systems haven’t evolved their business models to match these advancements in technology. Businesses in industries as diverse as finance to retail need their DRaaS providers to innovate alongside the market and provide managed availability solutions alongside traditional disaster recovery.
IT service continuity management is still an emerging technology, but new software solutions offer advanced functionality that combines disaster recovery and high-availability management in one package. These new solutions allow business continuity service providers to offer complete continuity management across on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployments.
In other words, wherever the data and critical systems reside, and wherever they’re moving to, service providers need to be able to tell their clients that they can expect zero to minimal interruptions in service. In order to do this, they need software that facilitates multidirectional, cross-cloud protection, recovery and migrations.
The technology is out there. Cross-cloud migration services can move physical and virtual systems across platforms or cloud providers seamlessly, and nearly instantly, without disruption to operations. Business continuity solutions are now available that provide multidirectional, one-to-many, cross-cloud protection, meaning data and critical systems never have to be offline, even when enterprises are moving between environments, from utilizing a testing platform to switching cloud providers.
These robust platforms can replicate all operating system applications and databases in a non-intrusive, nearly instant process that eliminates disruption in data and systems that lie at the core of enterprises’ operations.
With the diversity of platforms being used by the enterprise today, another key concern is the flexibility of solutions to handle any type and combination of environment. CRN’s recent “Reseller Attitudes to Backup and Recovery Solutions Report” asked resellers to rate what they perceived to be specific pain points for their customers. The reigning problem: backing up across all environments and devices. On a scale of 1-10, 69.2 percent marked this above a 7 in terms of difficulty.
This suggests a large demand for software solutions that allow MSPs to deliver real-time, cross system, hypervisor and storage system independent replication, recovery and migration services.
The implications of such service offerings are music to the business world’s ears. Operations no longer have to stop when system upgrades cause outages. Enterprises have the flexibility to move their data to new locations of their choosing. Employees are empowered to perform tasks as efficiently as possible without the headache of not being able to access necessary applications, and operations are resilient in the face of system interruptions. The ability of these solutions to migrate systems of any size nearly instantly means businesses can shift vast amounts of data without worrying about system failure.
Software solutions with offerings such as these are the future of IT service continuity management. These technologies and business needs aren’t going away, and MSPs are hungry for solutions that are forward-thinking, flexible and reliable. The new generation of disaster recovery solutions is here.
Lee Exall is managing director of Capital Continuity, a provider of business interruption protection software (BIPs) specifically developed for managed services providers (MSPs). BIPs is a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) and cloud migration software solution that delivers enterprise level replication, recovery and migration services for clients with uniform or diverse environments. Capital Continuity was named one of five
“Cool Vendors” in Gartner’s Business Continuity Management and IT Disaster Recovery Management, 2015 report.