If there’s one thing that can completely derail digital transformation plans, it’s a cyberattack. Attackers grow increasingly sophisticated every day while businesses continue to add vulnerable endpoints and links throughout networks and IT infrastructure. No matter how safe and reliable cloud infrastructure has become, a single targeted DDoS attack could lead to costly downtime for your business.
Enough high-profile enterprises have experienced public cyberattacks and data breaches that security is now a top priority for any business leader. While disaster recovery (DR) was once a luxury for only the biggest brands, it has become a necessity for all companies.
However, there’s confusion in the market for business continuity. So many solutions are sold with the promise of high availability (HA), even experienced IT leaders can misunderstand what this term means.
HA and DR might seem synonymous, but there are important distinctions that impact data protection in your enterprise.
HA and DR Are Complimentary, Not Substitutes
You’ve likely purchased IT infrastructure solutions that have guaranteed “nines” of availability. In a perfect world, you might expect this promise of HA to apply in all scenarios. However, IT leaders must recognize that HA focuses on uptime during routine operation. When an application or system is guaranteed at five-nines availability, you and your employees will have access for all but about five minutes per year.
The caveat is that HA guarantees do not apply to disaster scenarios. Businesses that are tempering DR investments because they think HA is enough are making a mistake.
DR is where recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) come into play. If you experience a cyberattack or withstand a natural disaster that results in downtime, you need to know your:
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RPO: The threshold for data loss between the time you experience a disaster and when you resume normal operation.
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RTO: The specific amount of time you can withstand until applications and services must return to normal operation, as outlined in a business continuity plan.
Without DR to balance HA, you run the risk of significant data loss in case of unexpected downtime. And without HA to balance DR, your employees could lose access to important applications and services frequently during normal operation.
For years, the issue has been the cost to implement HA and DR throughout an IT infrastructure. If you’re taking data protection seriously, though, it’s time to deploy solutions that are built with both HA and DR in mind — and it doesn’t hurt if they fit the budget as well.
American Digital and HPE SimpliVity Meet Enterprise Data Protection Demands
Implementing the HPE SimpliVity 380 hyper converged solution has IT infrastructure benefits that yield data protection that can balance HA and DR needs. With HPE SimpliVity 380, you gain:
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Automated DR: Integrated recovery automation tools make it possible to enjoy one-click remote restoration of virtual machines to accelerate RPO and RTO.
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Efficient Data Management: Virtualized workloads can be backed up and restored in seconds or minutes even when you’re dealing with bandwidth-constrained WAN links. Legacy infrastructure might give you hours or days of unexpected downtime, but hyperconvergence can help you achieve cost-effective high availability.
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Lower Total Cost of Ownership: HA and DR aren’t new, but they haven’t always been affordable. HPE SimpliVity 380 can give you an all-in-one solution that eliminates the need for standalone backup and recovery solutions. Getting rid of many legacy third-party solutions can significantly reduce costs.
American Digital is a Hewlett Packard Platinum partner that can help you implement HPE SimpliVity 380 and other IT infrastructure solutions quickly and efficiently.
If you’re ready to take advantage of budget-friendly data protection and overall IT agility, contact American Digital today.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise specializations include Platinum: Converged Infrastructure, Networking; Gold: Cloud Builder.
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