Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: #ZertoCon Keynote Preview
I will be at ZertoCon, a newly launched business continuity conference by Navisite partner Zerto. We are a Platinum sponsor, and I’ll be presenting the keynote talk, where I’ll share some insight into just how much DR has changed in the last five years, and I’ve invited our partner OSHEAN onto the stage with me to share some details on implementations that they have completed for their clients. It’s exciting to have an event like ZertoCon come onto the scene especially as BCDR and its impact on IT are becoming a top priority for businesses focused on migrating complex workloads to the cloud.
Today’s organizations have to the deal with many challenges (natural disasters, human error, cyber attackers, hardware failure) when it comes to storing and managing critical business data. The reality is that businesses are grappling with an unprecedented influx of data and new IT requirements brought on by emerging forces like the Internet of Things (IoT) and the industry’s growing reliance on digital devices. Gartner predicts there will be 6.8 billion connected devices in use this year, leaping to 20 billion connected devices in 2020. With this pace of change the importance of IT agility, resiliency and preparedness has never been so important.
As a cloud provider, we are seeing a pressing need to provide solutions that meet clients’ needs for flexibility, security, scalability and business continuity, while also reducing the amount of time and resources spent to manage the systems. In working with Zerto, Navisite’s Disaster Recovery solution addresses the complicated task of operating and managing replication on-premise VMware environments to the cloud. Working jointly, Navisite and Zerto are setting the standard for the protection, recovery and migration of data in the cloud and virtualized data centers in hybrid, private and public clouds. Navisite and Zerto have a shared commitment to bringing reliable and budget friendly DR-as-a-service (DRaaS) to our clients and that’s something we are very proud of.
At ZertoCon myself and our partner OSHEAN will be giving a presentation on business resiliency, addressing everything from basic continuity to security, high-level risk management, crisis management and more. While I don’t want to give too much away, I will share a few pointers on how businesses can build a strong BCDR foundation:
- Start with hosting: Your business resilience strategy should feature a hosting partner that can act as the second location of your IT operations. The hosting partner should be able to support your complete range of platforms and operating systems and provide all important capabilities: redundancy and failover architectures, backup networks and more.
- Audit applications: Examine your applications thoroughly. Are they enabled to take full advantage of business resilience requirements? If not, what scope of work is required to re-architect them to do so?
- Benchmark technology: It’s prudent to undertake complete testing of your infrastructure and processes. How long does it really take to recover from a disaster? For example, do the servers and storage devices respond quickly? What hurdles do you encounter—and what steps do you need to take to eliminate them?
- Partner with experts: Make sure you work with experts in SQL databases, Oracle applications, Windows and Linux operating systems, network protocols, networked storage architectures and virtual desktops. When the pressure’s on, you want smart options and insights—not empty stares.
Keeping a business up and running is one of the biggest challenges that both IT and business leaders face today. Having the right BCDR solutions and plan in place will help ensure organizations are ready to take on any IT challenge that comes their way.
Download our whitepaper The Technical Foundations of Business Resilience, for more tips and steps on how to start building your BCDR strategy.