Education-levels of those investing in the technology have also increased as well, with Cashman talking about “larger customers typically have a defined DR strategy in place and have been working to refine and improve their DR capability”. He added that recent technology improvements “make it easier and cheaper to have an enterprise-class DR solution” as well.
Comsys enterprise account manager Owen Mulcahy agreed with Cashman that organisations have become more educated on the possibilities and challenges presented by BCDR solutions. In this regard, he said that over the past 12 months it has become clear to him that “more and more” organisations are seeking solutions “beyond the traditional DR”.
Cold back-up
Where once there was a “cold back-up of their data sitting off site, just laying idle, just in case the worst might happen”, customers are now required to make more use of their investments and the conversation is changing from “disaster recovery to disaster avoidance and business continuity,” according to Mulcahy.
He continued, “BCDR solutions are still found in many guises. Some are looking at virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cloud-based PBXs to enable them to spin up remote offices for hundreds of employees while still remaining in complete control of their data.” For others, he said, downtime is simply not an option and they are looking to roll out active/active data centres with technologies that mitigate risk by allowing for the complete loss of one data centre without interrupting the business.
“The good news is that since we can now virtualise everything from servers to networks and storage we have a lot more options. You cannot take a cookie cutter approach to BCDR and simply replicate a single solution; each customer’s requirements and budgets are different,” added Mulcahy.
Availability, affordability
Looking back over recent months, director with Renaissance, Michael Conway commented that to his mind, the most innovative solutions introduced within the BCDR market are largely based around “availability and affordability of the technology to support the reduction in recovery times and minimising the loss of data”.
Conway said that “innovation is really not the most significant thing but the adoption of the technologies is the part which some organisations have embraced more urgently than others”. However, on a more technology-focused note, Rob Paddon, solutions director at Trilogy Technologies said that the increasing uptake of disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), automation of processes (“once a DR plan has been invoked”) and use of cloud or cloud-like service to enable DR are all options that are now “relatively proven and mainstream” enough for companies to consider.
“There are a number of key objectives that most customers are aiming for,” continued Paddon. “The biggest driver is to reduce the fixed costs of DR without compromising the delivery of the service when it is required. It is easy to lower costs by lowering the DR requirements (longer times to recover or less stringent targets for data loss for example) but to keep the required recovery targets and reduce costs needs innovation and new ways of designing and delivering systems. Another objective is to remove effort and also in parallel reduce the risks of errors through automating the DR procedures,” he added.
Lorcan Cunningham managing director at Savenet Solutions also commented on this debate, saying that companies want “a full offsite disaster recovery solution” as well as “desktop recovery without having to buy hot seats in a workplace recovery centre”. With this in mind, they will look towards a “full cloud” DRaaS solution which has the ability to deliver the “end user application over the internet to any web enabled device such as home PC, thin client, laptop, tablet or iPad”, Cunningham added.
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