Disaster recovery involves a set of policies, tools, and procedures for returning a system, an application, or an entire data center to full operation after a catastrophic interruption. Ultimately, disaster recovery solutions are designed to defend enterprises from the crippling effect of downtime.
However, although all DR solutions are designed to attack the same problem, all disaster recovery solutions and approaches. The vast number of options to choose from is leaving many enterprises to struggle with their backups and restorations. In fact, 72% of organizations are poorly positioned in terms of disaster recovery capabilities today, with 63% likely suffering from “mirages of overconfidence,” according to the recent DRaaS market guide report from Gartner.
Unfortunately, many of today’s DR solutions for cloud-native workloads only focus on backing up the manifest file with its persistent volume. In contrast, other cloud resources, configurations, and relationships required outside of the Kubernetes environment are back-seated or just ignored. This presents an apparent problem for enterprises as those elements are essential to effectively restoring the entire environment in a different cloud altogether.
Recently, Wanclouds and the team at IBM outlined and discussed the various reasons why IT leaders are continually faced with having to change their disaster recovery and cloud backup strategies, as well as the business continuity reasons for embracing a warm DR strategy. Resiliency is the critical component for deciding on a DR location. So let’s take a look at how Wanclouds and IBM Cloud work in tandem to deliver that resiliency in the form of a robust backup in the cloud.
Cost Effectively Planning for the Worst Conditions with Warm DR
The difference between warm and hot DR may appear nebulous at first, but they have some essential distinctions. Cost, of course, is the primary consideration for most enterprises. Thus, warm DR becomes the most attractive option as the cost of owning and operating a dedicated DR solution is not only cumbersome but financially impossible for small to medium-sized enterprises. Moreover, a traditional hot DR solution needs to return value on investment.
Ongoing, fully burdened costs can include your data center, labor, connectivity, power, infrastructure, and maintenance. But can a warm DR solution really be a more cost-effective alternative to traditional disaster recovery? Despite the ongoing demand to optimize cloud spending in the face of rising cloud costs, utilizing a third-party, public cloud, such as IBM Cloud, as a warm disaster recovery site has proven to be a significantly less expensive approach than creating and managing a hot DR site while enabling enterprises to stay competitive and within their RTO and RPO goals.
Most importantly, enterprises are able to remain resilient even under the worst possible conditions. Enterprises that leverage IBM Cloud’s capabilities not only protect themselves from unexpected downtime from local threats to on-premise, such as extreme weather, but they can also rest easy knowing their backup or disaster recovery location will not suffer the same fate that befalls physical data centers.
But IBM Cloud doesn’t stop there—by partnering with a managed service provider such as Wanclouds, end users avoid major upfront costs and ongoing complexities by opting for a monthly service subscription. By juxtaposition with traditional DR solutions, a DRaaS subscription by Wanclouds effectively moves the burden of maintaining the alternative site to the vendor, eliminating the spend upfront and reducing overall operating expenditures.
Sustaining Data Integrity from Start to Finish
Ask almost any enterprise leader what their long-term business plans are, and you’ll most likely get an answer that includes leveraging, analyzing, and using data. Of course, something as powerful as data needs to be protected at all costs, which is why enterprises need disaster recovery solutions in the first place.
All established disaster recovery software and solutions must satisfy any data protection and security requirements that your organization is mandated to adhere to, as well as follow best practices for disaster recovery. IBM Cloud can help you ensure that all data backup and failover systems are designed to meet the same standards for ensuring data confidentiality and integrity as your primary systems. Various regulatory standards stipulate that all businesses must maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Failure to comply with such regulations can ultimately result in significant financial penalties for enterprises.
It's also important to note that not all data is built the same. In the event of a disruption, enterprises require a disaster recovery partner that can sustain data integrity for enterprises’ most critical workloads, as well as a DR site that can house these applications and have them up and running within hours. For example, SAP applications and data are critical for many organizations, supporting their core operations and decision-making. However, we all know that SAP workloads are prone to a litany of threats, such as cyber-attacks, natural disasters, human errors, etc.
Wanclouds’ re-imagined approach to the traditional disaster recovery strategies, DRaaS, removes these complexities and provides a reliable, quick, and cost-effective DR solution, which, in turn, can give smooth backups and restorations for complex workloads such as Kubernetes workloads, SAP HANA databases, as well as other complex cloud environments such as VMware, or a mix of Linux, Windows Virtual Machines or Red Hat Openshift workloads. More importantly, Wanclouds delivers these features through its SaaS solution called VPC+, which is fully integrated with IBM Cloud.
Furthermore, end users also have the option to add one or multiple IBM Cloud accounts along with Cloud Object Store buckets, as well as discover and visualize their infrastructure (VPC) blueprint and resources. This visualization comes in handy during troubleshooting sessions, such as tracking security rules or VPNs, or load balancers.
Overcoming Hybrid-Cloud DR Challenges
When it comes to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, making sure that enterprises are backing up all data from on-premise and across all their public cloud platforms is essential to meeting RTO & RPO goals. Moreover, there’s a stronger emphasis on overcoming cost and performance hurdles as DR plans for hybrid clouds are substantially more complex than organizations operating within a single cloud environment.
Therefore, enterprises that are operating within a hybrid cloud environment should seek vendors that understand the planning and tools that go into supporting the unique requirements of hybrid clouds. With Wanclouds VPC+ DRaaS, enterprises operating within a hybrid cloud environment can discover and track all their resources deployed across multi-cloud environments, visualize VPC topology and relationships, set up compliance policies, track spending, and back up to IBM Cloud.
Additionally, VPC+ by Wanclouds can ease the discovery of on-prem and edge Kubernetes clusters to be backed up onto IBM Cloud Object Store, while on-prem/edge OpenShift clusters can be restored as a new cluster on IBM Cloud. Once restored, enterprises can be up and running via IBM Cloud without having to be concerned with the data bandwidth limitations that drag along backups and DR site restorations for weeks.