To be clear, no data protection product can “commoditize” or “package” disaster recovery (DR)– much less business continuity (BC) – because:
- Real BC/DR is as much about process and culture as it is about technology.
- Real BC/DR is about aligning business functionality to its IT dependencies, then reducing risk or mitigating how those business processes will persevere, even if/when IT systems are interrupted.
- Real BC/DR isn’t just about server failover, it’s about planning for the complexities of re-homing IT resources and ensuring those plans and processes are well documented and have as little human dependency as possible, because humans make mistakes with minute tasks, especially under stress….
BUT:
- For business processes to persist, you need applications to have digital resiliency.
- For applications to have resiliency, you need to recover servers, not just restore data, and the process of doing that on alternate infrastructures (i.e., on-premises, off-premises, or cloud-hosted) is not trivial.
- For servers to come online on alternate infrastructure, you need three things:
- A myriad of detailed steps that should be architected by humans but performed through orchestrated workflows, so the steps can be executed the same way every time.
- Routine testing of those complex workflows with an isolated sandbox so as not to impact the production network and resources.
- Monitoring of service level agreement (SLA) preparedness and documentation of processes and readiness.
Unfortunately, it turns out that humans are not good at these key requirements:
- Consistent execution of detailed tasks,especially under stress or across multiple diverse servers during times of crisis like a natural disaster or cyberattack.
- Routine testing, because testing is often perceived as less important than pretty much everything else.
- Monitoring and documentation, because those tasks are even less pressing than testing.
And this is where orchestration – preferably delivered by Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator – comes in. But this isn’t a blog about Orchestrator or orchestration as much as it is about understanding what organizations look for in their tools to align with their strategies and IT architectures when it comes to BC/DR. To answer these questions, consider the results of the largest independent data protection research project ever published, with 3,393 unbiased respondents across 28 countries. Of those, 1,987 discussed their BC/DR strategies and desired methods. Here is a short four-minute video summary of some of those research findings:
As a follow up to that, Melissa and I authored a BC/DR executive brief on more of the research findings and implications, which you can download here.
We’ve covered a lot of information about data protection research, so if you missed the earlier blogs and their short video summaries, check them out here:
- Part 1: What is driving change & what are organizations looking for moving forward
- Part 2: What do Hybrid and Multi-Cloud architectures look like and how does that affect your data protection strategy
- Part 3: Data Protection Trends in Public Sector
- Part 4: What does “Enterprise Backup” mean in 2022?
- Part 5: Data Protection Trends in Healthcare
- Part 6: Alignment of Backup within Cyber Preparedness
- Part 7: Real-World Statistics on Downtime and Data Loss in 2022
- Part 8: What should BC/DR look like in 2022?
- Part 9: What is driving Data Protection Strategies in Financial Services and Insurance for 2022
Please reach out to Melissa (@vMiss33) or Jason (@JBuff), or email us at StrategicResearch@veeam.com to tell us how this research aligns with your organization’s data protection goals for 2022 — and don’t forget to download the full report!
Click here to download the full Data Protection Trends 2022 report.