Hurricane Sandy was not an isolated event. As the world becomes more densely populated these natural events will cause bigger impact. The world is becoming more interconnected too. More organizations rely on intelligent systems to support their operations than ever, and these systems need infrastructure.
Latin America is no exception. Our digital economy is new but rising, growing fast and catching the eyes of investors all over the world. And nature challenges us at times just the same.
How can you overcome these challenges while reducing costs and improving your service levels? Here are a few high level guidelines:
Virtualization is a proven technology that can dramatically reduce infrastructure costs and in many cases, make business continuity projects viable. While server and storage virtualization are already mainstream, network virtualization solutions are just beginning to emerge and promise to bring much value to enterprises as they continue to move workloads to the cloud.
By decoupling workloads and infrastructure, virtualization provides the foundation for flexible deployments, hardware independence and mobility. If you need to invest in infrastructure to build protection, think virtual.
Disaster Avoidance is a new term that is rising as an evolution to the usual Disaster Recovery architecture. This architecture is based on highly virtualized infrastructure (server, storage and networking) where both Data Centers will be active (Active-Active), allowing organizations to recover from unplanned events (traditional Disaster Recovery) and even eliminate downtime by proactively moving workloads to the remote infrastructure. For instance, you can migrate workloads from a highly exposed Data Center to a facility that is not in the path of a natural disaster, without losing any downtime.
Efficiency in disaster recovery is key. Technologies like data deduplication and data compression not only help cut costs on capacity, but also impact a very expensive part of the solution: telecommunication costs.
Flash storage brings performance efficiency, the ability for the infrastructure to support bursts of demands without multiplying the size and costs of the platforms and quickly adjust to moving workloads.
But the most critical dimension of efficiency is on the management side. The ability to have automated and orchestrated recovery procedures for the business applications landscape is essential to keep business running as usual. Manually supported scripts will not keep up with the speed of changes and will either have exponential costs or fail to keep all the elements protected.
Finally, Cloud is a great opportunity for organizations that need protection but cannot afford the investment on a fully redundant infrastructure. Public cloud services allow pay per use alternatives and an easy-to-scale model.
There are many emerging offerings for Backup-as-a-Service or even Recovery-as-a-Service that can help your organization improve service levels. Also, many of these Services Providers use similar virtualization, efficiency and mobility technologies, but at a scale that allows a viable economic model for both consumers and providers.
As Latin America enters the digital universe, uptime is more critical than ever. Considering our particular challenges in both geography and infrastructure, it is very important to choose a partner that can help you protect your business with the highest value and the lowest risk.
