Mohamad Rizk, Manager System Engineer, Middle East Veeam, tells Intelligent CIO how businesses can achieve availability in a multi-cloud era.
The new digital economy has brought about many changes, forcing businesses and their IT infrastructure to react in new ways to meet new demands. When it comes to cloud, the changes are just as dynamic.
With this big move to multi-cloud, the next question is How can businesses ensure their apps and data are available across the new multi-cloud models they are adopting?
Before that question is addressed, here are a couple of statistics highlighting the downside of low availability:
- 66 % of enterprises admit that Digital Transformation initiatives are being held back by unplanned downtime
- US$ 21.8million is an average financial cost of availability and protection gaps for the enterprise
Fortunately, there are some measures businesses in the Middle East can take to ensure optimal availability. Here are three key multi-cloud availability best practices to consider:
Leverage the cloud for backup and disaster recovery of your on-premises data
A good start for any availability strategy is to make sure you’re following the 3-2-1 Rule, which is to have at least three copies of data, two of which are local but on different mediums, and at least one off-site copy.
Businesses with a multi-cloud strategy are in an ideal position to take advantage of the cloud to help execute a 3-2-1 approach and optimise any legacy backup systems with the cloud.
Veeam allows businesses to leverage any public cloud provider, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud or a managed service provider to protect data off-site or get a disaster recovery solution to meet RTO and RPO requirements.
Protect your data that’s already in the cloud
It’s important to have control and protection over data already deployed in the cloud. Email data, for instance, is something many organisations must retain for extended periods of time for compliance and regulatory needs.
Whether you’re using a SaaS solution, such as Microsoft Office 365, or hosting your email application on IaaS, it is critical to have protection against accidental deletions, outages, or a malicious attack. Availability solutions such as Veeam help achieve protection with copies of your data to another location – either on-premises or to a different cloud data centre.
Replicate and migrate applications and data within your cloud
In a multi-cloud strategy, you’ll most likely have ‘born in the cloud’ applications in your environment. Being able to replicate these applications for data protection and recovery will be critical to make sure these apps stay up and running in the event of unexpected downtime.
For instance, you may currently run your cloud-based app in the IBM Cloud data centre located in Houston, Texas. With a modern-day availability solution, you can easily replicate and migrate this app to any of the 50 plus IBM Cloud data centres around the world, or to any data centre within your cloud to meet your data protection and migration needs.
With the momentum to multi-cloud adoption in full swing, having an availability strategy and plan is more important than ever. Keep these approaches in mind when assessing how you’ll enable availability across your multi-cloud environment, so you can confidently accelerate innovation without worrying about disruption to your business.
