Mobility ensures protection and performance in the cloud

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.

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

Pro­mot­ed by Zer­to