IT environments continue to evolve beyond physical servers. Today, many important production resources operate on virtual machines (VMs) running on multiple hypervisors, and more organizations have been moving their mission-critical business processes offsite to the cloud. As a result, the requirements for protecting organizational data, recovering it, and ensuring its availability also have changed.
ESG finds that:
- Although not all servers are bound by a single service level agreement, SLAs should drive the search for the right data protection solution. An organization should adapt to the diverse uptime requirements of its workloads by incorporating a range of activities—including backups, snapshots, replication, and availability technologies—into its data protection strategy.
- Organizations need to be aware that whenever they modernize a modern, heterogeneous IT production environment, they must make corresponding enhancements to the protection environment as well. When commensurate protection modernization efforts do not occur, VM recovery failures will likely result.
- Organizations searching for a better protection, recovery, and availability solution should regard flexibility and agility as key differentiators. It is important for these organizations to take note of the agility with which a prospective solution accomplishes recoveries (i.e., if it is capable of application-consistent recovery, granular recovery, etc.) and the recovery platforms that the solution can leverage (i.e., recovery to another cloud or to a different hypervisor).
- The importance of good automation is growing dramatically. The greatest differentiator between “a backup tool” and “a virtualization-savvy data protection and availability solution” might be its ability to orchestrate and automate the recovery of a complex IT environment.
