Hybrid Cloud: A New Way of Thinking About Disaster Recovery
Protecting business applications against outages, failures, disasters and other causes of downtime is a top priority for many organizations, but as we discussed in our last blog, not all companies have the budget, expertise, time or staff to spare to improve their IT resiliency. For organizations that do have DR services in place, the challenge lies in maintaining the solution on an ongoing basis – this has led many to look into refreshing their options, in order to cut on spending and leverage existing investments as much as possible.
Customers want DR to be faster, cheaper and simpler. And with only 5% of today�s applications protected by DR, Gartner predicts that mid-size enterprises are the expected growth market for recovery-as-a-service. For those that lack a comprehensive DR plan or the expertise and resources to configure, manage, and test an effective DR plan, the answer to disaster recovery is in the hybrid cloud.
With hybrid cloud, organizations can easily extend their on-premise DR solution on- or off-premise, without heavy upfront investment. Hybrid cloud also allows DR to be within reach for more customers, giving them the ability to cost-effectively cover tier 2 applications not included in their existing DR plan. And even more importantly, it enables companies to utilize the same tools and technology they currently run and are already familiar with in their datacenters.
Planview, a VMware customer and provider of cloud-based enterprise software, is a great example of an organization that currently has a DR solution in place, but is considering a cloud-based disaster recovery plan to complement their solution. Its requirements for a cloud-based DR solution are three-fold: it must be cost-effective, easy to deploy within the organization and flexible enough to support changing business needs.
The company is excited to leverage VMware for their hybrid cloud needs, due to the affordability, simplicity and flexibility of VMware�s hybrid cloud offering. With VMware, Planview�s IT organization doesn�t have to learn how to use new management tools in order to take advantage of the cloud, because they can use the same tools and resources they�re already familiar with in their internal infrastructure.
Is your organization ready to consider a hybrid cloud-based disaster recovery plan? Here are four things you should keep in mind when evaluating vendors:
- Platform compatibility: Your service provider for DR should seamlessly integrate with your current environment.
- Ease of Use: Your DR plan should be easy to deploy within your organization, and not require additional training or resources for your IT organization to manage it.
- Cost: Look for a DR plan that has straightforward packaging, with no upfront fees or deployment requirements. Ultimately, your DR plan should save you money, not cost you more due to hidden one-time fees.
- Flexibility: Your organization has changing needs, and your DR plan should reflect that. Look for a solution that can scale your compute and storage needs according to business demands, and for whichever term length best suits your needs.
Our recently announced DR solution, vCloud Hybrid Service –Disaster Recovery, is packaged specifically for DR – a convenience many public cloud vendors do not currently provide for end user consumption. It�s also simpler, more affordable, and easier to use for organizations who are already familiar with vSphere technology, including SMBs.
For more information or to get started, visit us at vCloud.VMware.com.
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