Beyond the checkbox: Building confidence in your DR strategy

Disaster recovery (DR) is often no more than a checkbox item for IT, because the team spends so much time fighting fires and working to advance new, mission-critical implementations. To that point, DR didn’t make CIOs’ top five priorities in the Foundry State of the CIO 2024 survey. So, given the lack of focused attention on DR, it should come as no surprise that many CIOs lack confidence that their system will enable them to recover quickly in the event of a disaster or a ransomware attack, making DR an afterthought where it should truly be a proactive strategy.

Disasters come in many shapes and sizes, from natural disasters such as flash floods, hurricanes, and fires to technological misfortunes such as ransomware attacks and the failure of key servers. CIOs should prioritize selecting a DR solution that engenders trust. Because although DR has a reputation for being cumbersome and complex, it doesn’t have to be that way, as long as you choose the right strategy for your organization.

When evaluating DR solutions, here are the characteristics CIOs need to consider:

• Deployment options. The modern enterprise IT environment spans on-premises data centers, colocation data centers, the edge, managed services, public cloud, and private cloud. CIOs need a DR solution that can be deployed in any of these environments and ultimately achieve hybrid cloud aspirations.
• Recovery SLAs. CIOs have service-level agreements (SLAs) that they need to fulfill with various stakeholders for data and application availability. These SLAs include recovery time objectives (RTOs) — how long it takes to recover — and recovery point objectives (RPOs) — the maximum amount of tolerable data loss. RTOs and RPOs will not be the same across all workloads. Some especially critical workloads may require RTOs and RPOs that are measured in minutes, whereas less critical data may have SLAs measured in hours or even days. CIOs need a DR platform that’s powerful and flexible enough to meet all these different requirements in an affordable manner.
• The ability to test recovery plans in a nondisruptive environment. Aside from performing well in an actual disaster, there’s no better way to build an organization’s trust in its DR system than by conducting a test. However, it’s critical that those tests do not disrupt the production environment.
• Enabling hybrid cloud DR strategies. Modern IT environments often deploy workloads across multiple environments, such as the on-premises data center and the cloud. The DR solution must be able to protect and recover these workloads while simplifying failover and failback across environments.
• Protecting backups in WORM-enabled object storage. Ransomware attacks data by encrypting it with an algorithm that requires a secret key to decrypt. But to do this, the ransomware malware must be able to write to the data. Write once, read many (WORM) object storage allows data to be written only a single time, but it can be read as often as needed, which protects it from ransomware attack. WORM-enabled objects stores ensure that data is safe from not only outsider threats but also insider threats.

Nutanix NCI eliminates complex IT silos, simplifies operations, and reduces costs while meeting SLAs across multiple environments, including hybrid. The system can fail over and fail back to anywhere the Nutanix Cloud Platform runs. NCI supports WORM-enabled object storage, and the new Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) enables organizations to migrate snapshots to the cloud to deliver even faster RTOs.

Learn more about the Nutanix Cloud Platform.