2016 DR Solution Trends

Enterprises are beginning to fully embrace the utility of the cloud, and offsite recovery, as the most effective means of backing up data.  

Also, as virtualization continues to gain dominance, enterprises are finding their legacy systems inadequate for recovering data at the speed and currency they need in order to operate a successful business.

In 2016, more enterprises will transition further to cloud-based backup and recovery to support a virtual environment and provide BC.

Zetta.net (Zetta, Inc.), provider of enterprise cloud backup and DR solutions for businesses and MSPs, examines the trends developing in enterprise requirements for backup and recovery to support virtualization, offering the following predictions:

1. Enterprises Will Realize Fast Recovery is Essential.
More organizations are considering a secondary continuity plan – such as offsite recovery – to further ensure BC. When physical servers go down, offsite redundancy enables organizations to get back in operation more quickly.

2. Virtualization Will Catch a Break.  
The ‘last mile’ of virtualization poses a challenge with enterprises reliant on older applications and OSs. Fortunately, 2016 will be the year of the truly virtual datacenter as OSs and applications are upgraded to become more virtualization-ready. As a result, enterprises may finally be able to migrate those legacy applications to their virtual infrastructure.

3. Compliance Requirements Demand Solid DR.  
Enterprises need to be compliant in meeting regulatory standards for BC. Backup and recovery is a critical part of BC – ensuring that operations can continue after a disruptive event. As compliance requirements escalate, enterprises are adding DR improvements to their overall IT strategy, notably direct-to-cloud backup and recovery. This approach controls costs by eliminating the need to invest in additional physical resources or to build an offsite datacenter.

4. DR Evolves to DRaaS.  
DR as a Service, or DRaaS, is the successor to DR, as enterprises seek to do more than recover file data from the cloud or wait for systems to be spun up, on demand. The future lies in greater functionality, in advanced solutions that not only spin up servers in the cloud, but also integrate all the pieces together, to run a usable environment and enable true continuity.

5. Interdependency Will Drive DR Expansion.
Today, applications, critical or operational, are becoming much more interdependent, necessitating a different approach to DR. Now, all business systems need to be fully recoverable. In 2016 and beyond DR strategy will shift to including all systems in a recovery scenario, to provide continuous availability.

“We are starting to see more businesses implementing a true DR/BC strategy for two main reasons: first, boards and senior management are becoming more aware of the exposure of not having a DR/BC plan in place, and secondly, new technologies are bringing big-enterprise type IT DR capabilities within the budgetary constraints of smaller organizations,” says Jeff Whitehead, CTO, Zetta. “In 2016, we expect to see businesses from small to large capitalizing on direct-to-cloud backup and DR to take advantage of its inherently offsite nature, which provides more resilient BC.”