Disaster Recovery in a Virtualized World

In today’s always-on, information-driven organizations, business continuity depends completely on IT infrastructures that are up and running 24/7. The costs of downtime are huge and data loss can put a company out of business. Data loss is not only caused by natural disasters, power outages, hardware failure and user errors, but more and more by software problems and cyber security related disasters. Therefore thorough security and business continuity strategies are crucial for modern businesses, minimizing data loss and downtime.

Especially now, as data centers become more and more softwaredefined, these private, hybrid and public clouds become more vulnerable to these kinds of threats. In a software-defined, virtualized environment, applications run on virtual machines (VMs), independent from the hardware. Though this brings a lot of efficiency benefits to the business, these benefits are not extended into the realm of disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC).

Most DR/BC solutions are still based on physical entities, arrays and appliances, and lack the ability to scale with the amount of data modern organizations produce. Many of the benefits achieved through virtualization, therefore, can be lost because of the management overhead and the complexity of aligning a virtualization strategy with disaster recovery tools designed for physical environments. Virtualization-aware BC/DR solutions are needed to overcome this.