Radically Reduce Downtime and Data Loss with SaaS-based Disaster Recovery

As 2022 wraps up, many IT leaders are re-evaluating their current infrastructure to understand how they can continue to modernize, reduce complexity at scale and — most importantly — protect their organization. Common pain points include management overhead and rising costs, with their overall impact on budget becoming a larger and larger concern.

But it’s not just the price tag. Ransomware attacks, natural disasters, and other unplanned outages continue to rise, requiring more attention and highlighting business risk. To reduce the impact of these outages, enterprises require simple, automated responses that cover 100% of business requirements while minimizing resources and improving processes. Planned downtime, for IT migrations and moving to the cloud, also consumes valuable organizational time. IT leaders know they need to invest more heavily in modern data protection services to streamline operations and avoid disruptions.

They also know that without a reliable disaster recovery (DR) solution to protect business-critical applications, all their modernization efforts could be rendered moot in a matter of seconds.

Downtime and data loss are common – and expensive

An IDC survey across North America and Western Europe highlights the need for effective disaster recovery. Titled  “The State of Ransomware and Disaster Preparedness 2022,” the study shows that “79% of respondents indicated they had activated a disaster response within the past 12 months, with 61% of those responses triggered by ransomware or other malware. Indeed, 60% of respondents said they had experienced unrecoverable data during that same time, substantially more than the 43% response rate to the same question a year earlier.”

According to these numbers, C-suites now equate ransomware to a disaster event. They also recognize that these attacks and outages are no longer a question of if, but of when, how often, and at what cost? In that context, an agile and reliable DR solution is a must-have in today’s digital world.

The cost of downtime and data loss

In their report, IDC states that downtime costs around $250,000 per hour, on average, across all industries. Since this average includes small businesses, the actual per-hour cost to mid-size and enterprise businesses actually surpasses $1 million.

Financial losses represent only part of the problem. Data loss, productivity, and brand reputation are also at stake. A disruption can lead to even more significant losses for your organization, including loss of employees, users, and customers. If the breach leads to exposure of personal information, just a few minutes of downtime can result in years of reputational damage and loss of trust. On top of that, the average recovery time from a ransomware attack is 21 days, so administrative drain and long-term cost will weigh heavily on your organization for weeks, if not longer. 

If ransomware attacks are inevitable, then IT decision makers must prioritize disaster recovery. To do so effectively, they need to understand two factors that define a truly robust DR solution.

You need enterprise-grade, continuous protection

Today’s organizations can’t afford to lose data. To protect data, productivity, and revenue, companies need to increase the granularity of recovery while maintaining performance. To accomplish that, they need true Continuous Data Protection (CDP), which provides granular recovery to within seconds, as well as the option to recover to many more points in time. This  tool dramatically reduces the impact of outages and disruptions to your organization.

CDP is the best way to protect your business and achieve business continuity. Compare it to traditional backup and snapshots, which entail scheduling, agents, and impacts to your production environment. With true CDP, your recovery point objective (RPO) is reduced to minutes, with just a few seconds of data loss.

Picture this scenario: A cyberattack suddenly hits your organization at 10 p.m., but you’re able to recover immediately to a state seconds before the attack. As a result, within just a few minutes, it’s as if the attack never happened. With true CDP, that kind of disaster recovery can be your reality.

The right DR can elevate operational efficiency and reduce costs

As you begin to review and refine your day-to-day operations, it’s critical to measure how much downtime would cost your business. From that calculation, you can provide a compelling argument as to why your organization needs further investments in data protection. The 3-2-1 backup rule is no longer enough, as businesses cannot afford hours of downtime and data loss. Your backup service needs to work hand in hand with your disaster recovery solution to ensure you’re well secured.

Adding true CDP technology to your disaster recovery plans enables you to increase your operational efficiency in five ways:

1. Leverage automation and orchestration to reduce the need for disparate tools and the amount of administrative drain while protecting your workloads.
2. Increase productivity and drive innovation while allowing your team to focus on innovation or clearing ticket backlogs.
3. Modernize and scale your infrastructure as needed with a DR solution that fits you at every stage, regardless of upgrades or expansions.
4. Save money with granular recovery to minimize data loss and resources dedicated to managing an unplanned disruption.
5. Monitor, measure, and report accurately on your SLAs, RPOs, and RTOs to meet compliance requirements.

SaaS-based disaster recovery delivers even more

A little over a year ago, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) acquired Zerto, the industry-leading disaster solution. Zerto pioneered the DR industry with true CDP, and it continues to deliver the fastest recovery experience due to three key capabilities:

1. Near-synchronous replication: Data replication that leverages the speed of synchronous replication without impacting your production environment and the efficiency and restore capabilities of asynchronous. Zerto uses block-level replication, so each change is copied at the hypervisor level without a need for agents, snapshots, or scheduled maintenance.
2. Unique journaling technology: Checkpoints of data are stored in a journal every few seconds for up to 30 days. Granular restore points enable you to recover a wide array of objects directly from the journal, so you can recover whole sites, individual applications, and even single files.
3. Application-centric recovery: Ensure write-order fidelity across all VMs, datastores, and hosts. This allows an application to recover as a single cohesive unit to an exact point in time.

Today, this underlying technology is available on the globally accessible HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform. HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery is a SaaS-based DR solution that provides true CDP and a seamless cloud operational experience. With HPE GreenLake, you can manage everything from storage to compute to networking — and now disaster recovery — from a single, unified platform on any device.

Radically reduce data loss and downtime through continuous data protection on a global, scalable platform with HPE GreenLake for Disaster Recovery and start boosting your organization’s confidence in recovery from any outage.

About Kyleigh Fitzgerald