Business Continuity in Today s Cloud Economy. Balancing regulation and security using Hybrid Cloud while saving your company money.

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1 ! Business Continuity in Today s Cloud Economy Balancing regulation and security using Hybrid Cloud while saving your company money..

2 Business Continuity is an area that every organization, and IT Executive, wants to maximize. Given the dynamic nature of business today, how can one stay on top of the ever changing suite of applications used within any organization? Cloud, On-premise, Hybrid, and SaaS applications all have very different data sets and wildly different BC requirements! Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are not synonymous. Disaster Recovery (DR) is simply the ability to preserve an organizations data and systems through a negatively impacting event. Business Continuity (BC) is what will allow an organization to continue to function during and following a negatively impacting event. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are needs that can be incredibly expensive, resource intensive and error prone. Budget-squeezed organizations simply aren t able to run as efficiently since they aren t able to have their ideal scenario for data management. The result is a catastrophic failure at the worst possible time, during an actual emergency! Thoughtfully designed BC environments can provide first-class disaster recovery without huge capital and operational investments. For example, using owned, leased-access, or hybrid cloud architecture provide more options today than ever before. This huge advance is largely brought to us through the benefits of virtualization technology. For most organizations that utilize commodity x86 or AMD servers, gone are the days of leased hardware, shared warm sites, or exactly duplicated infrastructure. The many advantages of virtualization is well beyond the scope of this paper, however, we will focus on one: the portability and interoperability of virtual machines across BC environments. Are those storm clouds? The cloud isn t for everyone. Remember how DR and BC aren t synonymous? Many think the cloud is a safe place for documents that will save their business during a disaster. What they don t realize is that it s just a housing unit and data integrity & information domicile regulations can constrain a pure cloud-based Disaster Recovery strategy. Yet, a significant portion of data can be housed and run from a cloud BC environment. The ability to create subsets of data based on business classification and regulation is a key component of VMware-based BC/DR management software. By harnessing the public cloud for compute, backup storage or an entire secondary infrastructure, you can maintain control of your sensitive production data, and meet both recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO & RPO), while cutting DR costs. Data or workloads that are driven to operate or reside in higher security compartments can be directed to a smaller private DR environment. This allows for an organization to achieve a unique balance of high-security or regulatory-driven compliance while experiencing the cost savings that a cloud-based DR environment can provide. This scenario will be further explored in this whitepaper. Run your applications in the public cloud; keep your data private.

3 ! If you need complete data control for security or compliance purposes, you can save capital and operational costs by taking advantage of an IaaS provider to run your applications with maximum scalability and redundancy, while keeping your data private and applying the security and performance capabilities you require. VMware vcloud Air is one such platform. Interested in implementing vcloud Air? Let s run through a few points. First, identify locations that meet the DR needs based on minimum separation, disaster zones, etc. Second, set up private storage at these locations and replicate it over point-to-point connections (long-haul, Ethernet preferred, or wherever is most cost-effective). Third, set up secure, direct connections from these locations to public cloud services(s) of your choice. Don t skimp on redundant providers or connections as they can overload or fail during a disaster. This is an important place where many businesses fail to plan. During Hurricane Katrina, the national impact was felt across multiple carriers due to the large volume of data that was forced to traverse along alternate paths. The introduction of flexible bandwidth circuits from many carriers has dramatically reduced the costs associated with the introduction of redundant connections. Public Internet connections are unlikely to provide the low latency, security and reliability you need for the best application performance and quick failover. Dedicated, high-performance, lowlatency interconnections between Cloud Compute providers and on-premise storage are your best bet. On-premise, dedicated connections can be expensive but VMWare s vcloud Air or IBM s Spectrum Virtualize software can achieve fast network performance at a minimum cost by locating your private infrastructure in a colocation facility close to multiple cloud and network providers. Cloud-based Disaster Recovery Some colocation providers offer partnerships with large storage and compute providers to achieve truly exciting solutions for instant application failover. If one provider suffers an outage

4 or slowdown, the application can fail over instantly to the second. This can be achieved using an innovative mix automated virtual machine replication and application monitoring. What does my local storage have to do with my DR/BC environment? Compute and Memory performance are very largely reflexive and respond well to the resource controls that are in place within most virtualized data centers data Storage isn t nearly as reflexive. Poor performance or capacity (throughput) exhaustion can be interpreted by automated systems monitoring as a failure and trigger unnecessary DR-site activation/failover. Store secondary data in the public cloud, keep production storage private. Another viable DR scenario is to keep production storage private but use the public cloud for secondary DR storage, either via replication, redundant snapshots or traditional backup depending on your DR needs. Automation technologies such as snapshot mirroring, vcloud Director, and SAN-to-SAN replication can make this optimized storage environment a seamless reality. Utilizing technologies like IBM s FlashCopy allow for the collection of near-instant copies of data that can then be used for backup or offsite replication. Here again, consider harnessing private, high speed, low latency redundant network connections and network providers, where possible, to maximize security, reliability and performance. When it comes to replication, latency is often more important than bandwidth. Ensure your transport providers provide aggressive SLA s for the transit time across their network. Also, make sure you can effectively monitor and enforce those SLA s! Duplicating Your Infrastructure on the Cloud What do you do about the existing investment in the replication technology from your storage provider? Reuse it! Duplicating your entire infrastructure in a distant secondary location is the crème de la crème of Business Continuity. Utilize native and inline data deduplication on your SAN! This allows for less wasted storage space at both your production and BC sites. If you are still stuck on a legacy non-tiered storage system consider investing in a SAN that can automatically optimize your storage workload across multiple types of storage 7.2K nearline, 10K, 15K, and even Flash/SSD. You get a faster and more optimal storage system that can cut down on the total volume of disks and trays you need in both your production and BC sites. Highlights 1. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity is not the same thing. (DR) will allow your business to preserve data. Business Continuity will allow your business to function during and after a catastrophic event.

5 2. Thoughtfully designed BC environments can provide first-class disaster recovery without huge capital and operational investments 3. Many think the cloud is a safe place for documents that will save their business during a disaster. What they don t realize is that it s just a housing unit and data integrity & information domicile regulations can constrain a pure cloud-based Disaster Recovery strategy. 4. The ability to create subsets of data based on business classification and regulation is a key component of VMware-based BC/DR management software. 5. VMware vcloud Air will keep data private while applying the security and performance capabilities you require. 6. The introduction of flexible bandwidth circuits from many carriers has dramatically reduced the costs associated with the introduction of redundant connections. 7. VMWare s vcloud Air or IBM s Spectrum Virtualize software can achieve fast network performance at a minimum cost by locating your private infrastructure in a colocation facility close to multiple cloud and network providers. 8. Poor performance or capacity (throughput) exhaustion can be interpreted by automated systems monitoring as a failure and trigger unnecessary DR-site activation/failover. Store secondary data in the public cloud, keep production storage private. 9. Utilizing technologies like IBM s FlashCopy allow for the collection of near-instant copies of data that can then be used for backup or offsite replication. 10. Utilize native and inline data deduplication on your SAN! This allows for less wasted storage space at both your production and BC sites. You can avoid the huge capital this kind of architecture typically entails by housing your backup infrastructure in the public cloud. You'll pay a monthly fee for the infrastructure or service only when you use it. Thanks to virtualization, you don t have to duplicate your primary infrastructure exactly for quick failover and business continuity. Set up the locations that meet your DR needs and replicate these locations, preferably over dedicated links, to ensure performance. The aggregate capacity of your DR environment must be able to accommodate your workload, but gone are the days of perfectly matched CPU s and servers! Don t skimp on your DR investment, as you ll regret it when the time comes.