Organisations utilising virtualisation seem to be placing themselves at greater risk of substantial data loss even though the virtual technology they are deploying improves efficiencies and reduces the cost of disaster recovery.
A recent survey conducted by Applied Research, on the state of backup and recovery capabilities in virtual environments, showed that nearly half of enterprise data stored on virtual platforms is rarely backed up and that over 60 percent of virtualised servers are not incorporated into disaster recovery plans. Considering disaster recovery now comprises of more than a quarter of annual IT budgets this is a worrying sign.
As the market highlights there is certainly no shortage of disaster recovery solutions designed to protect virtual environments. The fact of the matter is that virtualisation actually makes recovery of servers and infrastructures that much easier by increasing performance and flexibility. In today’s world we are seeing organisations host infrastructures in the cloud, so it is strange why there is still this inability or unwillingness to ensure successful backup of virtual environments. As many solution providers demonstrate the cloud provides a much more flexible backup and disaster recovery framework then traditional solutions and often at lower prices.
Reliability has often been an area of concern for organisations looking to implement virtual environments especially with mission critical systems and data. The fact of the matter is that virtual environments performance and resilience is excellent, although however good a solution is one still can’t stress the importance of data backup and disaster recovery. The variety and expertise of backup and recovery providers’ worldwide means no data or systems should ever be excluded. Such features as CDP and ‘hot’ database backups mean that not only recovery time objectives are met but recovery point objectives are achieved.
Data is the lifeblood of any organisation, so every measure should be taken to protect it. Virtual infrastructures are playing an increasingly vital role in enterprise data infrastructure, but to leave it out of the DR equation is surely a step too far.
