Datrium: Companies Looking for More Effective Disaster Recovery

The heightened threat of ransomware, particularly for the enterprise data center, is driving the need for disaster recovery (DR), and the public cloud increasingly is being considered as a DR site.

That’s according to Datrium‘s report on the State of Enterprise Data Resiliency and Disaster Recovery 2019, which assesses how organizations are implementing DR to protect their data from attack or disaster. The report’s findings are based on a survey of 395 IT leaders from organizations with 100 or more employees and that have DR plans already in place.

Kristin Brennan, Datrium’s vice president of marketing, tells Channel Partners the most surprising findings were the level of impact ransomware is having on enterprises.

Datrium’s Kristin Brennan

“Ransomware was the leading cause of DR events in the past 24 months and almost 90% of respondents are concerned about ransomware,” she said. “It was also surprising to see a massive shift to a cloud-based, on-demand DR model. More than 88% of respondents stated they would use the public cloud for DR if they could only pay when they need it.”

Half of all organizations surveyed have recently experienced a DR event, with ransomware reported as the leading cause, ahead of power outages and natural disasters.

“Most respondents are looking for more effective ways to respond to DR events, and DR budgets are increasing at 75% of organizations, so channel partners have an opportunity to provide services specific to DR like runbook and WAN design, testing and auditing services, and DR management,” Brennan said.

The industry norm is to have physical sites for DR, but the industry is shifting toward DR in the public cloud, according to Datrium. The most common approach to DR according to more than half of respondents is having more than one physical DR site.

Nearly one in four respondents said their organization is not responding to DR events as effectively as it could be. The top three considerations holding organizations back from responding to DR events include: the complexity of DR products and processes; high associated costs; and lack of staff skilled in managing DR.

“Cloud DR solutions have historically been very expensive and slow to recovery given format conversions and rehydration times,” Brennan said. “Almost 55% stated failback was difficult because virtual machines (VMs) had been converted to cloud-native formats and it was difficult to convert them back to VMware vSphere format conversions.”

The cloud offers greater ease of use and cost-efficient DR, solving several pain points that are holding organizations back from responding to DR events, including the complexity of DR products and processes, as well as high associated costs, according to Datrium.

“The right solution will always depend on the organization’s specific needs, but most are looking for an economical solution that meets their budget,” Brennan said. “In the survey, the top five most important capabilities in a DR solution were recovery time objective (RTO), ease of use, ease of failback, ability to keep VMs in their native format, and recovery point objective (RPO).

“As companies weigh the best defense options against ransomware, they should consider the benefits of using the public cloud for their DR sites,” said Tim Page, Datrium’s CEO. “They can counter the high costs of traditional DR solutions and free their IT staff to focus on revenue-generating initiatives. The public cloud offers lower management overhead and costs along with lower risk and higher reliability in testing and executing DR plans.”