2020 has been a year unlike we’ve ever seen before. The pandemic has forced organizations to either rethink or in many cases formulate their business decisions that contribute towards disaster planning and maintain business continuity during a crisis.
Digital transformation has been at the forefront for many customers’ strategic initiatives. An important part for our customers’ journeys towards the digital enterprise is moving traditional on-premises solutions towards a hybrid cloud model, to help resolve common problems such as:
- Underutilized servers
- High CAPEX for hardware
- Poor availability
- Not enough data centre/facilities space
and satisfy important business outcomes. These include:
- A reduction to CAPEX
- Reduced data centre footprint
- Increased agility
- High availability
- Reduced risk
- Increased automation
- Increased stability
An important piece in the journey is for businesses to ensure high availability of their operations in the event of unplanned downtime such as a system failure, security breach, human error or natural disaster. While no organization aims for any of these to happen, it is critical to prepare for the possibility to ensure that if one does occur you have a plan in place to guide your recovery.
Why it makes sense to make DRaaS the first step towards digital transformation
In many cases customers are looking to start their digital transformation journey with disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). It’s an easy first step in addressing the common issues around availability and CAPEX. Nobody wants to continue purchasing 2X of everything and paying expensive data centre costs at multiple locations. Store your DR data in the cloud, recover it in the cloud, pay for the systems you need and not the “just in case” duplicate array sitting hours away. The economies here make sense.
Disaster recovery is one of the things most companies struggle with the most. It’s like car insurance. None of us really wants to pay for something that we’re not sure we’re ever going to need. But, when something unexpectedly happens to that car, we’re very happy we’re covered.
The biggest challenges around disaster recovery planning include:
- Do you have a DR plan?
- Do you regularly test this DR plan? (It’s amazing how many plans sit in a dusty binder.)
- Is the plan automated? We’re not talking about Skynet level automation. I mean, if a disaster strikes, could you easily and quickly kick off an automated recovery plan?
This is where DRaaS makes total sense. It helps customers address the common pitfalls around availability and continuity, while satisfying the business outcomes commonly coupled with digital transformation.
How CDW can help you implement DRaaS
At CDW Canada, we’ve partnered with VMware to help our customers along their digital transformation journey.
VMware has partnered with Amazon AWS to create a software defined data centre in the public cloud, called VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware’s enterprise class software-defined data centre software to the AWS Cloud, and enables customers to run production applications across VMware vSphere-based private, public and hybrid cloud environments, with optimized access to AWS services.
Today, VMware Cloud on AWS has a great DRaaS offering. The solution has taken the DR orchestration/automation powers of VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) – which includes capabilities like pre-configured runbooks with priority tiers and inter-VM dependencies, pre-defined resource and network mappings, non-disruptive test workflows, guest-level custom recovery scripts, automated IP customization and detailed DR reports – and combined them with the elasticity and operational simplicity of the cloud in a way that is easy for vSphere customers to adopt.
We have senior consultants who work with organizations to ensure business continuity in the event of a crisis. Leveraging the VMware Cloud on AWS DRaaS offerings will help our customers start their journeys to the cloud. You will be able to utilize familiar vSphere solutions like SRM while removing barriers impacting important business outcomes to accelerate your company’s DRaaS planning.
If you have any questions about your organization’s digital transformation journey or its disaster preparation posture, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at 800.972.3922 or visit cdw.ca/solutions to learn more.
