Managing Disaster Recovery During Digital Transformation
December 14, 2020The current pandemic has taught businesses that digital transformation is about making them more agile in their responsive to uncertainty As shown in a recent Dell Study. We can see the challenge in meeting that goal in the intersection of digital transformation and disaster recovery services where both rely on the cloud and each other to progress.
Businesses understand cloud strategies harbor varied opportunities and challenges through the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS while also sharing commonalities for digital transformation journeys. The commonality is all businesses are seeking ways to democratize access to vital data, applications, and workloads, increase agile responsiveness and secure the assets.
Businesses are turning to disaster recovery companies for solutions. What they’re finding is many of these companies are struggling to keep pace with the varied needs of disaster recovery across customized cloud strategies. An example might be the needs of backup and SaaS access encompassing several cloud providers (multi-cloud) with varying services and approaches. The same is true for specific needs that stretch across hybrid cloud (public, colocation, and private) where workload spreads can shift based on access, costs, and specific security needs.
This makes it challenging to maximize cloud responsiveness through a digital transformation while aligning it with disaster recovery services and changing workload needs. Today’s businesses compete on their ability to leverage speed, business continuity (BC)/DR, and scalability for market penetration and service reliability.
Most businesses have discovered the cloud is a natural for disaster recovery services. But not every disaster recovery company has the reach and relationships to make it seamless across the cloud stack (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) and different providers (hybrid and multi-cloud). Other limitations of some disaster recovery (DR) companies include:
- Limited BCDR options
- Weak cloud provider links for variable and changing multi-cloud and hybrid needs
- Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) cost concerns
- Lack of options for remote office support
- Insufficient global data center reach options to ensure near-flawless uptime
Managing disaster recovery in a digital transformation world can be complex with lots of varied examples. Getting a handle on coherent recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) requires a lot of options for disaster recovery data centers is just one. The overall goal in holistic transformation and DR management is to achieve the same control and security of on-prem while also getting the best responsiveness, agility, and cost management.
While cloud DR can deliver those things, the chosen cloud services provider must have a broad set of interchangeable options that can fit each specific business need. That’s the only way to keep pace in a digital transformation climate while protecting the business against emerging threats and disasters.
If the pandemic has taught us anything it’s that agile responsiveness is key to digital transformations when permanent remote workforces rely on changing access needs. This results in a need for disaster recovery services that work holistically with digital transformation across:
- Cloud migration
- Application development
- Variable bandwidth needs
- AI and analytics
- Business innovation
Data, applications, and workloads are moving targets in the digital transformation journey, so disaster recovery data centers and services providers must be agile and innovative to avoid roadblocks.