Disaster Recovery Gets a New Backbone

Approximately 5,400 data centers exist in the U.S. today, according to Statista ─ the highest number of data centers in any country worldwide, with another 1,500 new facilities in various stages of development. The data center itself continues to be the “heart” of data-driven enterprise organizations, no matter whether on-premises or hybrid cloud. Whatever causes an outage or downtime in a data center can disrupt business operations, make data inaccessible, and inflict damage to reputation, customer relationships, and the bottom line.

When a disaster hits a data center, it’s clearly significant. It could be a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, a tornado, a blizzard, or an earthquake. Or it could be a mechanical disaster, such as a power glitch, hardware failure, or faulty wiring. In today’s environment, it could also be a digital disaster or cyberattack, such as a ransomware or malware, which takes down an enterprise.   

More than 40% of organizations have experienced outages over the past year, according to Statista. More than 90% of mid-sized to large enterprises report downtime costs are, on average, around $300,000 per hour. To avoid this unwanted cost, an enterprise disaster recovery plan must include a cyber-focused, recovery-first strategy for how fast your enterprise will recover in the aftermath of a disaster. To ensure business systems are back up and running in a timely manner, the disaster recovery plan should be part of a broader business continuity plan.

A key element is the foundation for rapid recovery of data, cyber resilient enterprise storage. Today, it goes beyond simply backing up data. Legacy ways of protecting backups are no longer sufficient. An add-on is also not enough. The data infrastructure of any enterprise today needs to be cyber secure from the ground up.

The Backbone of Recovery

Disaster recovery needs a new backbone — an enterprise storage backbone — in many data-driven organizations, which have allowed the storage infrastructure to become outdated or merely tangential to disaster recovery/business (DR/BC) continuity strategies and implementations.

Any enterprise or cloud service provider (CSP) that does not have the ability to recover mission-critical data quickly and reliably after a natural disaster or a cyber disaster strikes one of its data centers is likely suffering from a storage backbone which is less than optimal in redundancy and resiliency. It likely offers less than 100% availability and is settling for less than the highest level of enterprise storage performance available.

Wonder if your enterprise loses access to your primary and secondary storage because of an unforeseen, local disaster? This reduces your chances of recovering rapidly from the disaster. When an organization loses access to its backup storage, it reduces its chances of timely recovery. 

An earthquake or a hurricane can knock a data center off-line. An explosion at a manufacturing plant can cause an unexpected disruption to data-driven business operations. A ransomware attack or malware attack can take an enterprise’s data hostage and shut business operations down. These are all “disasters.”

To prevent the loss of data from a local disaster, the recommended strategy is (a) to have built-in cyber storage resiliency and (b) to have a redundant repository (cloud or a remote data center) where data is stored in case the first data center is interrupted amid a crisis. You’ll want to manage recovery speed (RTO) with a flexible storage infrastructure that simultaneously saves money.

Expediting Rapid Recovery

The characteristics of a storage backbone that can expedite fast recovery include the following:

• Extensive storage remote replication abilities
• Triple-redundant architecture
• Next-generation data protection capabilities
• Guaranteed 100% availability
• High performance, cyber secure backup targets

For a disaster recovery plan to be effective, single points of failure need to be eliminated, and there needs to be fast and reliable failover. This is part of what a triple-redundant storage architecture delivers. It enables 100% availability. No matter what the disaster is, the enterprise can ensure continuous business operations and uninterrupted access to business-critical data. Couple this with high performance for applications and workloads and you get a rock-solid backbone for your storage infrastructure.

On top of this backbone sits a software-based cyber storage resilience stack built into the storage system, enabling rapid recovery amid a disaster. Key features include immutable snapshots, logical air gapping, fenced forensic environment, cyber detection and automated cyber protection. These cyber capabilities should be incorporated into a disaster recovery plan to protect the data infrastructure, especially in light of cyberattacks, such as ransomware. Digital disaster recovery is a requirement for today’s enterprises.

Where Do You Start?

As a starting point for improving your enterprise’s ability to recover data rapidly after a disaster, it’s recommended to take the following actions:

• Categorize data by how critical it is in order to determine storage priorities
• Make sure the synchronization of data between primary and secondary storage systems is optimal
• Test your ability to recover data with your cyber storage resilience capabilities by simulating real-world scenarios

A disaster can hit at any time. When the backbone of the data infrastructure is cyber secure and strong enough to withstand the event, time is on your side. Your recovery of data is fast and efficient. It’s rooted in cyber resilient enterprise storage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Herzog

Eric Herzog is the chief marketing officer at Infinidat, a Lenovo company. Prior to joining Infinidat, Herzog was CMO and VP of global storage channels at IBM Storage Solutions. His executive leadership experience also includes: senior vice president of product management and product marketing for EMC’s enterprise and mid-range systems division, and CMO and senior VP of alliances for all-flash storage provider Violin Memory.