Page 10 - EngineerIt July 2021

ICT DISASTER RECOVERY

Top considerations for a

comprehensive DR strategy

By Kate Mollett, regional director at Commvault Africa

T infrastructure has evolved dramatically over the years and criticality? Can anything be automated or are you stuck in the
alongside this, so too has the nature of disasters. Where once default parameters? Which clouds can you deploy to? How easy
Ia disaster was an infrequent event related to extreme weather is it to burst into the cloud for a recovery? Do you need to have
or hardware failure, today’s disasters are far more granular in permanent cloud infrastructure in order to recover to the cloud?
nature. There are also numerous new workloads that need to be
accommodated, and recovery time objectives may have changed, Mix and match complexity needs a single
given the criticality of data. The question enterprises need to ask simple solution
themselves is, does disaster recovery (DR) meet these needs? The reality is that enterprises face challenges at all levels, with
The DR strategy needs to be updated with modern solutions for a variety of applications on different platforms from main frames
modern problems and ensure there are no holes that could leave and legacy technology to modern solutions like containers and
a business unable to effectively recover. Kubernetes. This mix and match approach makes DR more
complex, but fundamentally it still needs to cover four levels: the
You can’t recover what you aren’t protecting database level, the application level, the file system level and the
Today, a disaster is more than just a data centre failure. A disaster hypervisor level. However, it is important to bear in mind that there
could be a critical application becoming unavailable, a cloud are many flavours of this mix and match approach, with different
provider being unavailable in a specific region, ransomware, cloud providers, arrays, databases and more. Any solution needs
an insider threat, or a classic event such as a flood or fire. to be customisable, and abstracted to ensure that no matter
Workloads too have changed and now include elements such which array hypervisor or cloud instance is in use, the DR solution
as Infrastructure and Platform as a Service (IaaS and PaaS), can talk natively to it. This ensures the most cost effective and
cloud-native workloads, containers and more. Technology is all optimised DR solution.
interdependent, and businesses are dependent on technology A secure DR framework needs to cover five elements. First,
to function. A failure in one area could potentially cause a ripple it must identify and mitigate risks to backup data, within a single
effect through the entire organisation, and ransomware attacks interface. Then it needs to protect, by applying security controls
are increasing exponentially year-on-year. based on industry-leading standards. The next step is to monitor
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the nature of the DR plan for ransomware, insider threats and other dangers, and then
and strategy had to rapidly adapt, and there is no guarantee that respond by actioning on threats and continuously validating
such a shift will not happen again in future. Organisations need to backup data. The final step is to quickly recover data across
effectively plan, monitor and test the DR strategy, and ensure they multiple end points, no matter where they reside, including remote,
have the ability to act and recover. DR needs to cover all of these on-prem and in the cloud.
areas, but it also needs to be agile and flexible and cater for many All of this should be catered for in a single solution that
more sources of data, workloads and different disasters. In addition, is capable of orchestrating across a mixture of services,
it must do this from a single platform so that it does not complicate applications, workloads and storage platforms. Importantly, the
matters by incorporating multiple vendors and solutions. DR strategy also needs to be tested frequently and updated
often to ensure it remains relevant in a changing world. DR is
What’s missing from your plan? only as strong as its weakest link, so this weakest link needs to
Not all DR tools are alike, and not all of them will deliver be strong enough to protect modern enterprises from a range of
absolutely everything the modern organisation needs modern disasters. n
to effectively protect their data and recover from an
event. There is no such thing as a one size fits all Kate Mollett is the regional director for Commvault Africa
approach, and organisations need to investigate with a priority focus of leveraging Commvault’s well
thoroughly to ensure their solution will meet established partner network across the region, while
their needs. This should involve examining the looking for new partnerships to realise the huge market
functionality of the DR tools. opportunity in many African markets for SaaS based
If there are no agents or appliances, solutions and utility pricing options. Kate has over
are you getting the granularity you need to 26 years of technology experience. Prior to joining
recover effectively? If you have array-based Commvault she filled the roles of Regional Manager
replication, will this cause extra infrastructure for Veeam Sub Saharan Africa and more recently,
costs or vendor lock in? Are you able to Regional Manager for Africa. Kate can be
set different policies for different levels of Kate Mollett contacted on kmollett@commvault.com

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