It seems like it’s almost every day that the news reports another major company outage and as a result, the massive operational, financial and reputational consequences experienced, both short- and long-term. Widespread systemic outages first come to mind when considering disasters and threats to business and IT service continuity. But oftentimes, it’s the overlooked, “smaller” threats that regularly occur. Human error, equipment failure, power outages, malicious threats and data corruption can too bring an entire organization to a complete standstill.
It’s hard to imagine that these organizations suffering the effects of an outage don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place — they most certainly do. But, why do we hear of and experience failure so often?
Challenges with disaster recovery planning
Documenting
At the heart of any successful disaster recovery plan is comprehensive, up-to-date documentation. But with digital transformation placing more reliance on IT, environments are growing larger and more complex, with constant configuration changes. Manually capturing and documenting every facet of IT critical to business continuity is neither efficient or scalable, sending to us our first downfall.
Testing
Frequent, full-scale testing is also critical to the success of a thorough disaster recovery plan, again considering the aforementioned scale and complexity of modern environments — especially those that are multi-site. Paired with the resources required and potential end-user impact of regular testing, the disaster recovery plan’s viability is often untested.
Executing
The likelihood of a successful failover — planned or unplanned — is slim if the disaster recovery plan continues to be underinvested in, becoming out-of-date and untested quickly. Mismatched dependencies, uncaptured changes, improper processes, unverified services and applications and incorrect startup sequences are among the many difficulties when committing to a failover, whether it’s a single application or the entire data center.
Compliance
While it is the effects of an IT outage that first come to mind when considering disaster recovery, one aspect tends to be overlooked — compliance.
Disaster recovery has massive compliance implications — laws, regulations and standards set in place to ensure an organization’s responsibility to the reliability, integrity and Availability of its data. While what constitutes compliance varies from industry to industry, one thing holds true — non-compliance is not an option and brings with it significant financial and reputational risks.
Veeam Availability Orchestrator
To help overcome these common challenges faced by businesses of all sizes and industries, Veeam is very excited to announce that NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator is now generally available!
Veeam Availability Orchestrator brings a highly automated and resilient orchestration engine for Veeam Backup & Replication replicas, designed specifically to help satisfy compliance requirements, minimize downtime and ensure the continuous delivery of production IT services. Easily reduce the time, cost and effort associated with planning for and recovering from a disaster through the automatic creation, documentation and testing of your disaster recovery plan, fully prepared for C-level executive and stakeholder signoff, proving compliance with industry regulations and audits.
Document your environment
Meet documentation needs for compliance audits, legal requirements and your technical libraries with disaster recovery documentation that is automatically updated and republished as the virtual environment changes, including:
- Four fully customizable, template-based reports in an easy to consume format
- The ability to satisfy legal and compliance requirements with disaster recovery documentation delivered on a regular basis, fully-prepared for C-level executive and stakeholder signoff
- Automatically maintained documentation with up-to-date data as the virtual environment changes
Test your disaster recovery plan
Prove recoverability through automated disaster recovery plan testing and readiness checks with zero impact on production systems, reducing costs through the avoidance of expensive manual processes and the ability to:
- Easily execute both on-demand and scheduled testing and recovery verification
- Access real-time reports and dashboards for plan readiness, execution and testing
- Regularly test plan readiness without impacting production environment performance and its users
Execute your disaster recovery plan
Ensure IT service continuity and minimize service disruption through the failover and failback of multi-site disaster recovery plans for planned migrations, disaster avoidance and disaster recovery, including:
- VM, Application and service verification — like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and IIS — during failover, with predefined startup sequences
- Integrate failover execution into other business continuity tools through an open API
- Regulate access to disaster recovery resources with delegated, role-based access control
Summary
Compliance regulations and digital transformation initiatives — and the resulting stresses on IT for accountability and Availability — make planning for and recovering from disaster challenging. Veeam Availability Orchestrator brings a purpose-built solution designed to help satisfy compliance requirements and ensure the continuity of IT services and the business.
