FEATURE: DISASTER RECOVERY
Rick Vanover, Veeam’s director of technical product
marketing and evangelism, at Veeam
effective disaster
management strategy?
The strategy is very important. In
fact, these are principles taken into
account for the new Veeam Availability
Orchestrator product, as well as options
for organisations to build Disaster
Recovery plans with Veeam today.
I’ll share a few specific elements that
can highlight this process. The first
technology service needed in a disaster
is communication.
Whether it is email or phone systems;
communication lines have to be
established. But the big indicator is that
it’s not just a mail server or phone system online; users and
client software may need to be in place and pre-requisite
systems may need to be online as well (such as DNS).
Additionally, a Disaster Recovery Management Strategy
should be built in terms of applications and their associated
requirements. This way, the business can decide and be made
available in terms that they understand.
How have the associated technologies and strategies
around disaster recovery evolved over the last few years?
The last few years have actually shown us that a Disaster
Recovery strategy is very critical for organisations today.
Specifically, there is no ‘manual mode’ for many businesses
today. Just take the latest headline outage as an indicator
of the dependency that data centres have in running any
modern business.
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“The good
news is that the
technologies are
available today to
get organisations
where their
internal and
external
stakeholders
expect them
to be.”
That need for Disaster Recovery has evolved and technologies
have paved the way for innovation – and Veeam is investing
in this area significantly.
The key drivers and innovation areas that have enabled more
advanced Disaster Recovery are advances in virtualisation
technologies, cloud and service provider technologies and
advanced storage systems. These infrastructure technologies
pave the way for software vendors like Veeam to deliver a rich
availability experience to organisations of all types.
To what extent would you say enterprises have become
aware about the importance of Disaster Recovery, and to
what degree have organisations taken the right steps to
prepare themselves?
I’d hope that organisations have given Disaster Recovery the
requisite investment and preparation; but in fact this is not the
case. Each year, Veeam commissions the ‘Veeam Availability
Report’ that surveys CIOs around the world and it’s clear
that there is always improvement needed in this area for
organisations today.
The good news is that the technologies are available today
to get organisations where their internal and external
stakeholders expect them to be.
To prepare, I advise organisations to identify what
applications and parts of the IT organisation are in-need
of requiring a complete Disaster Recovery plan. Then
apply the technologies to get there, test it accordingly and
diligently ensure the documentation is updated. These are
some of the principles that will be incorporated into Veeam
Availability Orchestrator, and we see organisations of all
types interested in delivering a complete Disaster Recovery
plan for critical applications. n
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