Cloud has evolved drastically. A decade ago, analyst firms were frequently predicting that practically all organisations would migrate the vast majority of their workloads to the cloud. And while it was initially heading that way, companies soon learnt the cloud might not be the ideal place for everything as there are limitations. Security and compliance aside, it simply doesn’t answer every IT challenge.
This realisation has seen early adopters taking applications out of the cloud and the industry as a whole embracing more of a hybrid philosophy, putting specific applications in the places where they are likely to perform the best. To make this work, organisations have increasingly sought an ability to achieve mobility for applications and workloads, allowing them to be quickly moved in a cost-efficient and seamless way.
“There has been a big reality check, with companies learning a lot about where to put certain things,” says Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn, director of technical marketing at Zerto. “Still a lot of organisations are moving to cloud, but they’re much more careful now. They’re thinking about where applications should go and for the right reasons. Then the question is, how do I move applications to a different cloud provider if I need to? Mobility, therefore, should be central to any cloud strategy.”
Sitting alongside it must be data protection. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed flaws in many disaster recovery plans. Lockdowns meant some physical locations, including datacentres, were inaccessible and remote working put more pressure on systems and at different times.
Mobility ensures protection and performance in the cloud The cloud is increasingly important to an agile, performant disaster recovery plan, but like all cloud strategies it’s crucial organisations are able to move applications with ease.
With disaster recovery as a service, you can just call up your service provider and they’ll take care of it all for you
During this period, cybercriminals took advantage of the pandemic and we saw an explosion in ransomware attacks. This only added to the impetus to modernise disaster recovery strategies, with the cloud as the foundation. Disaster recovery as a service, in particular, is growing in popularity for organisations desiring not just convenience, but also confidence of continuity should disruption occur.
“Not having to run your own disaster recovery site anymore is very attractive to many organisations,” says Janssen van Doorn. “To achieve mobility with traditional disaster recovery, you don’t just need a solid datacentre, but also the right orchestration in place and the right service level agreements on the equipment and connections between datacentres.
“With disaster recovery as a service, you can just call up your service provider and they’ll take care of it all for you. It provides security and confidence in a service you just consume.”
Through a single, scalable platform, Zerto simplifies the protection, recovery and mobility of applications and data across on-premises and cloud environments. The software-only platform uses continuous data protection to converge disaster recovery, back-up and data mobility, and eliminate the risks and complexity of modernisation and cloud adoption.
As applications, and how and where they are deployed, change, companies must ensure their disaster recovery changes too. Whether applications live in an on-premises datacentre or virtual machine, a private, public or hybrid cloud, or a next-generation containerised or Kubernetes environment, which are more dynamic and operate at a very large scale, Zerto’s platform enables data to be seamlessly migrated from A to B.
“Zerto delivers a single platform to protect applications and solve different usecases,” says Janssen van Doorn. “Those use-cases include disaster recovery, mobility, back-up and long-term retention across all the different clouds. Zerto doesn’t only allow you to efficiently migrate data from VMware to another VMware datacentre, it also allows you to move it into Azure, or maybe migrate your application into AWS.
‘Built on a core of continuous data protection, we have a really efficient way of moving data, ensuring applications can be easily mobilised and protected, no matter how they are deployed.”
For more information please visit zerto.com/modernize
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