What is IT Resilience and What Does it Mean to Backup Users?
The science of backup and recovery continues to evolve. Twenty years ago tape systems were the primary backup technology; it was good enough to just preserve your data. Today backup has evolved to include the rapid recovery of not just the data but the applications used to conduct business operations. Recognizing that entire data centers can be brought down in a single event, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is now becoming a major component of organizational business continuity plans.
However, having all this recovery technology dependent on humans to recognize an issue, diagnose an effective solution, take timely action, and ensure recovery success puts the entire enterprise recovery process at risk. What is needed are solutions that can, in real time, handle the challenges themselves according to pre-orchestrated actions, building smart, self-directing capabilities into applications as well as the IT infrastructure.
This is IT Resilience.
IT Resilience Plan (ITR) to Protect Your Data
IT Resilience is the ability to protect data and apps from just about any type of issue. It is built through the adoption of a set of tools and applications that will automatically take action to protect data and apps from just about any type of issue. Take for example how ITR handles ransomware. ITR-capable vendors provide software that continuously inspects for malware infections on all backups, as well as easily restores production data to their state prior to the attack. ITR-enabled software products have evolved to support application resilience and work load shifting between production data centers and the cloud.
Why You Should Care About ITR
Gartner is perhaps, most famous for their Magic Quadrants, a report format that evaluates technology vendors from over 60 IT markets into 4 “quadrants”. Currently, Unitrends is positioned as a player in the June 2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Software and as a Visionary in the Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, also published in June of 2017. Unitrends is also mentioned as a representative vendor in the December 2017 Market Guide for IT Resilience Orchestration Automation.
While the IT Resiliency market is currently small, it is gaining greatly in size and importance. We are just at the beginning of this new technology. The early stages of ITR present a challenge for customers. Users are seemingly forced to integrate multiple vendors and solutions to achieve IT Resilience.
But why?
Backup, DRaaS, and ITR are natural extensions of each other. You can already protect on-premises and cloud applications and physical and virtual environments with dedicated backup appliances. You can also ensure uptime with DRaaS services that utilize those same backup appliances. If vendors can do all that, why can’t they automate the entire process (failover, testing, compliance reporting, etc.) to automatically respond when there is a threat?
There are vendors that can do it all. One indication that the vendor does it all is that they are willing to provide a DRaaS SLA. They are so sure that their recovery process will perform as required they are willing to financially back the results. ITR can provide measurable, trustworthy and repeatable RPO and RTO metrics since the technology is automated to work everytime.
Can your data backup and business continuity vendor do that? If not, maybe you need to look at a new provider that can better protect your company and you.
How Unitrends Can Help Your Company With IT Resiliency
Unitrends is literally the only product line in the market with the technology, expertise, support, and agility to be able to offer Backup, DRaaS, and IT Resilience. This shows that you can trust Unitrends to build out your continuity from basic backup, to second sites, or to the cloud, and add new IT Resilience resources when you are ready. This is becoming a critical process to increase enterprise uptime and confidence in a world in which IT pros must do more with less.