One of the roadblocks that has prevented enterprises from moving more of their mission-critical applications to public cloud has been concerns about availability and disaster recovery. If these apps go down or are unavailable for any reason, the business impact is enormous, affecting profitability and brand reputation.
Many IT teams have been hesitant to take the risk of losing control of these applications. The new reality, however, is that by leveraging the right public cloud solution, you can actually improve your ability to recover after disasters and achieve higher availability than you can with on-premises environments.
The truth is that most organizations already experience business continuity issues with their on-premises data centers. More than 80% of organizations say they experience an “Availability Gap,” according to research by Veeam, which means their recovery capabilities don’t meet the SLA expectations of their business units.
These gaps cost enterprises an average of $21.8 million a year in direct financial costs, according to the research, while also negatively impacting broader digital transformation initiatives, brand confidence and customer goodwill.
Public cloud and DR
Public cloud offers enterprises the ability to improve business continuity and disaster recovery at a much lower cost than a traditional option of building a secondary disaster recovery site. It is one reason why the market for disaster-recovery-as-a service is one of the fastest growing segments in all of IT, expanding at compound annual rate of nearly 40%.
In addition to cost savings, choosing the right cloud solution will deliver additional benefits in speed-to-deployment, reduced complexity, greater reliability and reduced workload on IT teams. For the most part, organizations can achieve better recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) in the cloud than they can on-premises, and at a much lower cost.
However, while most public cloud service providers offer disaster recovery and business solutions that will reduce costs, they may not be able to deliver the bullet-proof reliability that is absolutely essential for your mission-critical applications. For these applications, it takes a cloud provider that truly understands the needs of enterprise IT decision-makers.
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions: Bringing VMware Environments to the Public Cloud
This IDC White Paper highlights the strengths of the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions and illustrates how it offers a secure and flexible path to public cloud and to broader digital transformation.
Download NowBusiness continuity for mission-critical apps
As part of their effort to empower enterprise IT to feel confident in moving mission-critical applications to the cloud, IBM and VMware have addressed the business continuity and disaster recovery challenge by launching the industry’s first global multi-availability zone cloud architecture.
Called Mission Critical VMware on IBM Cloud, the solution is available for VM workloads in the IBM Cloud, as an architectural model to help enterprises prevent downtime for cloud applications and automate failovers from one cloud region to another. The solution includes IBM Cloud infrastructure, VMware software and IBM Services.
Mission Critical VMware on IBM Cloud is fully managed by IBM Services and can be deployed across IBM Cloud’s 18 availability zones. The solution covers a wide range of enterprise needs for business continuity and disaster recovery, including networks, storage, resiliency and tools for monitoring and troubleshooting cloud applications. The architecture can also be integrated with the services integration platform built on IBM Cloud to enable a broader consumption of services.
When it comes to delivering on business continuity and recoverability for mission-critical workloads, Mission Critical VMware on IBM Cloud delivers a targeted aggregate availability of 99.99%—which is higher availability and failover success rate than most organizations can achieve with on-premises environments or competing cloud platforms.
Conclusion
As enterprises embrace digital transformation, their reliance on their underlying technology infrastructure is more important than ever. If critical applications go down, the entire business goes down. Effective and efficient disaster recovery is an imperative, and solutions that eliminate unplanned downtime are part of the cost of doing business in the digital age.
The cloud provides a cost-efficient way to improve business continuity and disaster recovery, but it is essential to choose a cloud provider that is focused on the needs of enterprise customers, with an architecture that meets and exceeds enterprise expectations for quality and reliability.
