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 :

• 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. and learn how WEI can transform your IT infrastructure!

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

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Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. From natural catastrophes like floods and fires to cyberattacks and hardware failures, unexpected events can cripple a business’s operations. These seismic events cause downtime – which equates to lost revenue, damaged reputations, and a potential competitive disadvantage.

This is where disaster recovery (DR) comes in. Regardless of your business environment – physical, virtual, or cloud-based – we’ll outline how you can craft a well-defined DR plan to ensure you can bounce back quickly from disruptions, and minimize downtime and its associated costs.

Downtime Is Expensive

Unplanned downtime causes significant financial impact in multiple areas of a business. This leads to:

• Lost productivity
• Increased customer dissatisfaction because they can’t access essential services, which could lead to customers switching to a competitor.
• Potential legal repercussions, depending on the nature of your business and the impact of the outage.

Beyond the , as revealed by a Gartner study, downtime inflicts long-term damage on your reputation. This is why a proactive and robust DR strategy is essential to significantly reduce the risks associated with outages.

Tailoring DR Strategies For Optimal Recovery

An effective DR plan goes beyond a one-size-fits-all approach. It hinges on two key elements: prioritizing critical business functions and carefully assessing them. When conducting this assessment, consider classifying your workloads into three tiers.

• Tier 1: Mission-Critical Applications – These are the heart of your business, responsible for core functions like sales processing or financial transactions. Recovery for Tier 1 applications needs to be swift and seamless, often within minutes of an outage.
• Tier 2: Important Applications – These applications support daily operations but aren’t mission-critical. Think of email servers or internal communication tools. Recovery for Tier 2 applications can be less immediate but should still be prioritized.
• Tier 3: Non-Critical Applications – These are applications used infrequently or for non-essential tasks. Backups are sufficient for Tier 3 applications, with recovery times being less time-sensitive.

Categorizing applications allows you to tailor an effective DR strategy. This ensures you focus resources and recovery plans on the most critical applications, enabling a faster and more efficient overall recovery.

Cloud DR: A Cost-Effective And Flexible Solution

Powering public cloud providers such as AWS and Azure, Nutanix offers reliable DR solutions for business continuity. It’s not just limited to cloud-based applications, though, as this solution is also applicable to both physical and virtual business environments.

Cloud DR solutions offer seamless integration with virtual environments. This means your virtual machines (VMs) can be easily replicated and activated in the cloud during a disaster. This ensures a swift recovery of your applications and data.

For physical environments, cloud DR utilizes software agents installed on physical servers. These agents continuously replicate server data to the cloud, guaranteeing a recent copy is always available for restoration in case of an outage at your physical location.

Some cloud providers even offer bare metal recovery options. This allows you to recover your physical servers onto virtual machines (VMs) hosted in the cloud. This approach is flexible and gets your physical systems back online faster.

Regardless of the business environment, cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) offers several advantages that transform your strategy:

• Effortless Scaling: Cloud resources can be adjusted on-demand to meet specific recovery needs. This eliminates the need for excess on-premises infrastructure, saving you money during normal operations.
• Cost-Optimization: The cloud’s pay-as-you-go model eliminates upfront capital expenditure on hardware and DR infrastructure. You only pay for the resources you use, leading to significant cost savings.
• Geo-dispersed Protection: Cloud providers offer data centers scattered across various geographical locations. This allows for swift failover to a secondary site in case of a disaster, minimizing downtime.
• Remote Management Flexibility: DR sites hosted in the cloud can be set up and managed remotely. This eliminates the need for dedicated IT staff at the secondary location, streamlining your DR operations.

Overall, cloud DR offers a versatile solution for protecting both physical, virtual, and cloud-based business environments. It simplifies DR management, reduces costs, and ensures faster recovery times during disruptions.

Nutanix Clusters And NC2 For Seamless DR

Nutanix, through Nutanix Clusters and Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), is a terrific option for disaster recovery because it offers several advantages over other cloud providers. Nutanix Clusters is the core offering that provides an on-premise hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution combining computing, storage, and virtualization.

Meanwhile, NC2 allows you to run Nutanix Clusters not just on-site, but also in the cloud, with consistent management experience across both environments. This lets you leverage the familiar Nutanix functionality even when expanding your infrastructure to the public cloud.

The benefits of utilizing both Nutanix Clusters and NC2 are:

• Simplified Disaster Recovery to Public Clouds: NC2 extends the Nutanix environment to public clouds like AWS and Azure, creating a hybrid multi-cloud platform. This makes it easy to replicate your data and failover to the cloud in case of a disaster. Nutanix DR solutions use a tool called Nutanix Cloud Connector (NCC) to handle this process smoothly. NCC orchestrates the failover between your on-site environment and the public cloud you’re using for DR.
• Perfect for Cloud Migration: The familiar Nutanix platform simplifies the transition and minimizes disruption to existing processes. Businesses leverage their existing Nutanix expertise to manage their cloud DR environment.

Beyond The Cloud DR Tools

While cloud resources like Nutanix can be a powerful DR tool, a successful plan requires more than just the adoption of technology. Each organization should also consider the following best practices:

• Identity And Access Management (IAM): Strong IAM protocols ensure that only authorized users can access critical systems during a disaster recovery event. Multi-factor authentication and least-privilege access controls are crucial for safeguarding your data.
• Network Connectivity: Reliable and secure network connections between your on-premises environment and the cloud are essential for seamless failover. Our team of experts at WEI can assist you in designing and implementing a resilient network infrastructure to support your DR strategy.
• Cloud Security: Implement robust security measures to protect your data in the cloud, including encryption and access controls.

Final Thoughts

highlight the importance of protecting your business and data. Cloud-based DR tools offer significant benefits, but they are most effective when paired with meticulous planning.

WEI understands that an effective DR strategy requires a solid foundation as our team simplifies cloud DR. We tailor solutions that seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure, handling the intricate setup process for a smooth transition. Our services also extend beyond DR to cover , data center modernization, and more.

WEI’s deep technical bench is equipped to assess your specific requirements and assist you in choosing the optimal solution from our diverse cloud DR portfolio. Contact us today to schedule a consultation with our experts and ensure business continuity in the face of any unforeseen disruption.

Next Steps: When considering the implementation of unified storage, WEI has identified two main options for enterprises to consider: a web-based sandbox or rolling out on-prem. Each approach offers distinct advantages, and businesses should choose the option that best aligns with specific needs and business objectives. Listen as WEI’s Senior Architect & Virtualization Ambassador, explains. 

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When recording a significant event where every moment matters, would you choose a video camera or a standard camera? A video camera, complete with expansive memory, makes frame-by-frame recording possible. In contrast, a standard camera only takes occasional photos and fails to capture the in-between moments that define an event in its entirety.

For business operations to be complemented by a comprehensive disaster recovery solution, competent IT leaders would prefer a solution that is akin to the video camera analogy. In essence, it is about capturing the entire spectrum of your business processes without unnecessary gaps and blind spots. However, many organizations still use snapshot-based legacy solutions, like the mentioned standard camera, that only capture one single image at a time, potentially missing ongoing events that are critical.

CDP vs Snapshots

Zerto Disaster Recovery (DR) is a leading DR solution due to its modernized approach that utilizes continuous data protection (CDP). CDP involves the capture of all changes as they occur and replicate these changes to backup storage. Remember, continuous recording is the only way that IT leaders can ensure every single data change is captured and recovered.

Yet, there was a time in which organizations accepted less in the form of snapshot protection. Snapshots are point-in-time images of data taken at periodic intervals, capturing data or the state of a system at a particular moment. The problem is that you need more than that one moment in time, and because time is money, you are leaving money on the table when settling for snapshots. Businesses cannot afford periodic recovery. It demands continuous recovery, which is what Zerto delivers.

Recovery Point Objectives

The goal of DR is to swiftly restore an organization’s critical operations following an unforeseen incident, thereby limiting both data loss and downtime. This overarching aim is encapsulated in two key objectives:

• The recovery point objective (RPO) refers to the maximum amount of data loss an organization is willing to accept in the event of a disruption. As an example, an RPO of three hours means that in the event of a disaster, your organization can tolerate losing three hours’ worth of data.
• The recover time objective (RTO) is the duration in which business processes must be restored to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a disruptive event. For example, a company may determine they must recover and resume functions within two hours of a disaster.

Continuous data protection enhances RPO and RTO more effectively than snapshot-based methods by endlessly capturing and replicating data changes in real-time. With CDP, data loss is minimized to almost zero in the event of a disruption, as the most recent changes are already saved, significantly improving the RPO. Additionally, since the data is continuously updated and readily available, the time required to restore operations and data after a disaster is significantly reduced. Whichever way you look at it, CDP leads to faster recovery times and that includes all the pieces to your operations puzzle.

More About Zerto

A longtime partner of WEI, Zerto stands out with its true CDP solution to offer industry-leading RPO and RTO for companies that cannot tolerate business disruption. With Zerto DR, enterprises have the capability to recover anything at any point in time, within a granularity of seconds. What makes this possible is Zerto’s unique journaling technology. This approach not only ensures continuous data availability but also results in storage efficiency by eliminating the need for frequent, heavy snapshots. Key benefits of Zerto’s CDP solution include:

• No negative impact on production performance as Zerto’s CDP process operates seamlessly without affecting the production environment.
• Simplified operations without the need for complex scheduling thanks to Zerto’s continuous and automatic data protection approach.
• Minimized risk of data loss, with comprehensive and gap-free data recording.
• Reduced management overhead for storage arrays, enhancing efficiency and reducing operational complexities.

With Zerto, you gain a robust and efficient disaster recovery solution that addresses common challenges associated with traditional data protection methods.

Zerto Protects Your Applications, Too

Data alone does not do any good if you cannot act on it. It is your mission-critical applications that work with your data and create value from it, which means backing up the application environment is a must. This pertains to not just backing up files and folders, but also your virtual machine environment. This includes items such as the preconfigured boot-order of your VMs or the network and IP address configuration of their network environment. If you want to know just how resilient Zerto is when it comes to VM environments, it can handle VM counts in the five digits. That is what you call an encompassing solution.

Choosing Zerto and GreenLake Together

Choosing Zerto’s journaling technology for effective CDP stands out as a superior alternative to traditional snapshot methods. The decision to adopt this advanced approach is just the first step however, because the next critical choice is determining how best to integrate this technology into your operational environment. This is where the partnership between HPE GreenLake and Zerto becomes pivotal, offering Disaster Recovery CDP as a comprehensive service.

HPE GreenLake, renowned for delivering flexible OPEX solutions, now incorporates Zerto’s CDP, thereby streamlining the adoption process. This collaboration enables a shift away from traditional on-premises deployment or reliance on managed service providers (MSPs), offering a SaaS-based solution that fits into a diverse edge-to-cloud platform. With HPE GreenLake and Zerto, achieving RPOs in seconds and RTOs in minutes becomes a streamlined, efficient process, enhancing your DR capabilities within the HPE GreenLake ecosystem.

The integration with HPE GreenLake also means global accessibility to Disaster Recovery solutions via the Data Services Cloud Console (DSCC). This unified console allows for the management of all mission-critical and business-critical assets in one place, offering a simplified, comprehensive view. By consolidating these functions, HPE GreenLake not only enhances operational efficiency but also optimizes expenditures. With the ease at which these as-a-service solutions can be consumed, any other way of acquiring DR may seem as archaic as, well, snapshotting your environment.

Talk to WEI to learn how HPE GreenLake and Zerto can collaboratively to ensure the relentless progression of your business activities.

The post Is There A Better Way To Consume Disaster Recovery? appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

says that 64% of IT leaders cite improved data security for their organization as their top objective over the next 12 months. And for good reason. As technology continues to evolve, it’s not a matter of if an enterprise will have a ransomware attack but when it will happen. With technological advances, it’s not just enterprises that benefit, cyber criminals do as well.

Because of this assumed risk, it is not enough to only have the right technology in place; your enterprise must have a tried and true disaster recovery (DR) strategy laid out ahead of time. complements industry best practices to provide your enterprise with the strategy and technology it needs to safeguard against ransomware attacks that are costly to your data and public reputation.

Five Ransomware Best Practices

When putting together your enterprise’s disaster recovery strategy, here are the five best practices to protect against ransomware.

1. Identify: Determine what environments exist, the risks associated with those environments, and how they impact your enterprise.
2. Protect: Understand what you’re protecting your enterprise against so you can develop appropriate safeguards and contain the impact of potential ransomware attacks.
3. Detect: Accurately and efficiently identifying ransomware will help ensure your team creates an effective and timely action plan.
4. Respond: Develop and implement actions to take in a detected cybersecurity incident. The faster and more effectively you respond to a threat, the faster you can stop it in its tracks, mitigate its damage, and reduce any potential financial impact.
5. Recover: In the event of an attack, timely recovery to normal operations reduces the impact on the enterprise. Make sure you maintain plans for resilience and restore any impaired capabilities or services due to a

Your Enterprise Disaster Recovery Strategy

Your enterprise’s disaster recovery strategies must be thoroughly documented and tested to ensure their effectiveness. This is something Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator does automatically. With this tool, your mission-critical workloads with near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) to applications that have been neglected due to a lack of resources can be included in an automated disaster recovery process.

By deploying DR Orchestrator as part of your enterprise disaster recovery plan, your cybersecurity team will have the improved ability to:

• Reduce Risk. DR Orchestrator is a simple, powerful tool that has proven its ability to manage a disaster recovery plan through testing and documenting risks.
• Save Time. Free your IT teams to focus on other mission-critical areas in your enterprise. DR Orchestrator can automate the most time-intensive aspects of disaster recovery planning, such as creating and updating documentation and testing.
• Restore Confidently. From a single app to an entire site, with DR Orchestrator, you can meet RPO and recovery time objective requirements with one-click failover, failback, and restores.

Veeam’s DR Orchestrator Capabilities

DR Orchestrator’s robust feature set reduces risk, saves downtime, and restores data with:

1. Automatic documentation. Generate and create dynamic disaster recovery documentation to prove readiness and compliance.
2. Automated testing. With zero-impact disaster recovery tests, scheduled or on demand, you ensure required recovery time objectives and RPOs can be met.
3. Application verification. After a recovery event, common enterprise applications are examined to verify they are running as expected.
4. Role-based access control. You control the level of access app owners and operations teams have.
5. Instant test lab. With the instant test lab, you can utilize disaster recovery resources for patch testing or anything else without impacting production.
6. Wizard-driven planning. Quickly build comprehensive disaster recovery strategy plans for apps and sites that are automatically updated and verified.
7. One-click recovery. With just one click, you can recover single apps or an entire site from anywhere.

Put Veeam DR Orchestrator To Work For Your Enterprise

With comprehensive support for enterprise applications and infrastructure, Veeam DR Orchestrator can take your disaster recovery strategy to the next level with its robust suite of features. WEI will help you through the process and create a customized solution to protect your enterprise against ransomware. Contact WEI today to get started.

Next Steps: Download our NEW tech brief titled It further explains the 5 mentioned steps for a proactive and secure backup strategy.

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