I D C V E N D O R S P O T L I G H T

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1 I D C V E N D O R S P O T L I G H T R e c o ve r y i n t h e C l o u d July 2011 Adapted from The State of Business Continuity in End-User Environments in 2011 by Laura DuBois, Jean S. Bozman, and Eric Sheppard, IDC #227783; IDC's Worldwide Business Continuity Taxonomy, 2011: New Approaches to Ensuring Availability of IT Systems by Laura DuBois and Jean S. Bozman, IDC #226627; and Public Cloud Business Continuity Services Remain an Underserved Opportunity by Laura DuBois, Brad Nisbet, and Richard L. Villars, IDC # Sponsored by Doyenz An increasing number of disasters and security events occurring across the world have forced firms to place a high priority on backup and recovery. These organizations have "no time for downtime" because their customers expect immediate access to data and business services over the Web. Downtime may damage a company's reputation, impact customer loyalty, and cause revenue loss and impact a firm's viability (i.e., going out of business due to extended downtime). In addition, regulatory compliance requirements in specific industries such as insurance and financial services also play an important role in meeting specified recovery objectives and disaster recovery (DR) strategies. Trends like cloud-based IT services, software as a service (SaaS), virtualization, and application availability provide new options for datacenter deployments and advanced storage services. Such advanced storage services include backup and recovery services that copy onsite business data over a network to the cloud for recovery purposes. However, only copying data for file restoration is not enough today. Increasingly, solutions must provide the ability to capture a system image from application to operating system to configuration as well as the data. This enables not just file restoration but also full server recovery. The difference in these two approaches means recovery in hours versus recovery in minutes. While most organizations anticipate that unplanned downtime will occur, they are required to provide Web-enabled 24 x 7 x 365 access to key applications. Thus, planning for operational continuity and recovery from outages is rapidly becoming a top priority for commercial and government entities alike. As a result, organizations are implementing a variety of infrastructure on premises and/or procuring cloud-based software services to achieve continuity of business operations. Traditionally, larger firms were the only organizations in which business continuity was feasible because these firms had the budgets to invest in remote datacenter infrastructure and networking costs. However, with the availability of new technologies and online services, business continuity is increasingly attractive for firms of all sizes. For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in particular, recovery in the cloud makes business continuity economically viable, accessible, and available. This Vendor Spotlight looks at the trends and technologies affecting advanced storage services, including cloud backup and recovery, and discusses the role that Doyenz has in this increasingly important market. Introduction The backup and recovery needs of organizations have been changing rapidly. Recovery objectives that were once measured in days or hours are now measured in minutes. This is motivated by increased business reliance on IT infrastructure and by a diminishing tolerance for downtime of any duration and its financial impact. When downtime occurs, it brings unwanted visibility by customers, partners, stakeholders, competitors, and the industry at large and can even threaten the reputation and viability of the organization. IDC 1159

2 The task of ensuring business continuity is becoming more complex because of rising expectations about the IT organization's ability to prevent or to recover from unplanned downtime. Complicating the task are the following factors: the rapid growth of data through the organization; the distributed nature of data that must be recovered; the rapid adoption of virtualization technology and the associated virtual machine sprawl; and the migration of enterprise applications from large systems to n-tier architectures using clusters, or arrays, of small servers. Also influencing changes in the business continuity landscape is the evolution of cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS offerings. Suppliers of traditional IT hardware and software need to determine their role in a changing business continuity market or they will risk becoming less relevant over time. As we enter a new decade focused on more efficient delivery of IT services, opportunities abound for many technology providers to address specific customer groups or infrastructure needs relating to business continuity. New technologies, such as virtualization and cloud-based IT infrastructure and hosted applications (SaaS), are disrupting many traditional IT markets and distribution channels. At the same time, these new technologies offer the promise of higher levels of availability and recovery provided that IT organizations understand how to evaluate their efficacy and how to best deploy them to avoid lengthy periods of downtime. Advanced Storage Services: A Definition The opportunity for cloud-based storage continues to evolve as users and service providers explore the possibilities for different storage services. Storage in the cloud includes the storage services available from a public cloud offering. Use cases for storage in the cloud include basic storage capacity services, which provide capacity for basic block or file storage, and advanced storage services including backup services, archiving services, and disaster recovery services. Expanding beyond the offering of raw capacity, business-oriented advanced storage services offer additional value for information/data management in areas such as data protection, archiving, compliance, or business analytics. Examples of advanced storage services include: Backup and recovery. Backup and recovery services copy onsite business data and/or images over a network to the cloud for recovery purposes. Solutions in this category may be a hybrid and/or cloud pure-play approach. Retention periods are typically one year or less. Continuity. Continuity services also copy onsite primary business data and/or images over a network to the cloud. These services use replication software along with techniques such as clones, mirrors, and snapshots to make data and/or systems available for business continuity or recovery in the event of a failure. Benefits Typically, companies set recovery point objectives (RPOs) for the goal of recovering production-level data services within the stated time. They also set recovery time objectives (RTOs) for the acceptable amount of time within which recovery should have taken place. If either of those goals is not met, the IT organization needs to reexamine its objectives and take steps to improve its recovery capability because outages and downtime are inevitable over time. IDC specifically notes that the ability to restart applications on alternate resources and the ability to access production data are critical to restarting business services. Depending on the type of event, the business continuity of a given application is often achieved by failing over its services and user/client access locally within the same datacenter or to a remote, physically separate datacenter. With business continuity, the failover of a service can be measured in seconds (subminute), many minutes, or a few hours, depending on the types of workloads being restored and the price the customer is willing to pay for a very fast rapid restore. Traditional backup IDC

3 technologies, including those that rely on disks as a backup target, cannot provide this level of continuity of services. Backups, in order to be used, require a restoration process and are typically used for disaster recovery purposes using today's manual approaches and not for business continuity. Disaster recovery has traditionally required extensive manual methods to bring the IT environment, or the component that is not working, back to an operational state. For example, services need to be reestablished, servers repaired, applications restored, and the process of data restoration completed. Infrastructure used for disaster recovery can include virtualization, server hardware, network and networking services, remote datacenter facilities, replication, backup to disk, backup to tape, and tape vaulting. While business continuity for a specific workload is measured in minutes, disaster recovery is typically measured in hours or days. However, there are some well-designed DR plans that incorporate highly automated failover to designated DR hot sites. In these cases, through the use of the right technology, recovery can be achieved far more quickly. Market Trends The business continuity landscape is changing and changing rapidly. The confluence of several significant market factors is giving rise to increased interest in and changing approaches to business continuity: New business realities. The focus on minimizing capital expenditures and optimizing operational expenditures is intensifying. Organizations are operating under significant budget and personnel restrictions as they attempt to optimize their own IT deployments. Ongoing data growth. Businesses and consumers continue to generate tremendous volumes of business data and content. In addition, business are storing data for longer periods of time as they attempt to satisfy increased requirements driven by data analytics and compliance needs. Changing nature of enterprise applications. Today, many enterprises use end-to-end applications, tapping multiple server and storage resources to complete their delivery of business services. Traditionally, business continuity was aimed primarily at the central-site datacenter; today, it is becoming necessary to preserve business continuity for computing resources that may be located at a variety of locations in a networked computing environment. Advent of cloud-enabling technologies. Cloud-enabling technologies include virtualization that supports on-demand provisioning of workloads; more robust management software at the server and application levels; thin provisioning to improve the efficiency of block-based storage; the use of global, scalable file systems at the storage level; and increased bandwidth capabilities at lower costs at the networking level. Increases in networking bandwidth. As networking contracts are renegotiated, higher levels of network bandwidth are being provided at previous capacity pricing models making capacity more available over time. Although bandwidth remains a common concern for businesses of different sizes, overall capacity is increasing over time. Larger pipes, in concert with data reduction technologies, make sending data over public or point-to-point networks more feasible. These advances in technology, combined with the new business realities facing IT organizations, are leading an increasing number of users to consider or reconsider business continuity and the associated objective of DR. According to IDC, the worldwide market for storage in the cloud services, which includes data protection and continuity services, will surpass $12 billion by Organizations have long been attracted to the benefits of disk-based data protection (such as nearimmediate copies created through snapshots or quick restore times) and have been quick to adopt the technology. It should be noted, however, that tape is still considered a critical DR component for 2011 IDC 3

4 many organizations. IDC expects a further widening of the gap between disk and tape as data deduplication and automated tiered storage move toward mainstream adoption. Increasingly, organizations are turning to the cloud for data protection and recovery services: IDC data indicates that cloud services are actually quite popular with SMBs. New IDC survey data shows that approximately 13% of small firms and more than 30% of midsize firms plan to add cloud services in the next 12 months. The highest level of interest in cloud services is among firms that are looking to leverage advanced capabilities without making large investments in on-premises infrastructure as well as businesses seeking to ramp up their support for mobile workers with remote access to corporate applications and data. Interestingly, while backup and restore from disk is a viable approach to operational and traditional manual disaster recovery, it is not an approach that will yield true continuity of business operations the way other replication and availability approaches will. That is because recovery can happen more quickly via replication methods than if the data must first be retrieved from a backup and restore process. Hence, there is an untapped but needed ability to offer recovery in the cloud making business continuity, once the purview of only the largest firms, a feasible reality for a broader range of companies. Recovery in the cloud makes business continuity economically viable and accessible. Considering Doyenz Founded in November 2007, Doyenz is a privately held software company operated independently by a team based in Bellevue, Washington. Doyenz has developed cloud-based disaster recovery services that are designed to improve the efficiency and reliability of IT services. By converting the clients' server images to a network of virtual machines on demand, Doyenz offers its customers cloud services such as disaster recovery with failover and disaster prevention services including virtual lab access for testing software upgrades before deploying to production. These services are available via an easy-to-use Web portal with no hardware or software purchases required and a minimal level of training needed. Doyenz offers cloud-based disaster recovery services to IT service providers serving small and midsize businesses. Doyenz enables channel partners to offer disaster recovery, disaster prevention, and business continuity for physical and virtual servers to their customers. Doyenz supports recovery of two types of environments, VMware ESX and Windows, with dedicated agents for both: The VMware ESX Agent is a small Linux-based virtual machine that runs alongside existing virtual machines, leveraging ESX snapshots to take full and incremental backups of any guest virtual machine. The ESX Agent is configured to create snapshots and upload them to Doyenz, providing a verifiable backup and quick recovery in the cloud. The Windows Agent installs as a service on Windows servers or desktops and uses local backup to send image-level backups to Doyenz nightly, enabling protection of physical servers or virtualized servers on non-vmware platforms IDC

5 According to Doyenz, benefits of its cloud-based disaster recovery services include the following: Reduced RTO in service agreements Disaster recovery: nightly replication to the Doyenz cloud Disaster prevention: test software updates in the virtual lab before deploying to production Business continuity: failover in the cloud in the event of unplanned downtime Challenges Public cloud storage services are seeing adoption. However, customers still have concerns with security, data privacy, and switching costs in moving to a public cloud service. For customers moving to a public cloud service provider, reliability is important and so is brand awareness. As a relatively new player in the market for cloud storage services, Doyenz has to increase awareness among potential customers. Conclusion Increasingly, SMBs are placing high importance on their business continuity and disaster recovery efforts. Effective business continuity and disaster recovery programs are time-consuming, resourceintensive processes that come with many challenges, which ultimately impact planning, people, and technology/solution rollout within an organization. Yet such challenges can be dwarfed by those that arise when an organization is unable to recover from serious datacenter failures. As such, it is important for organizations of all sizes to spend the time and money required to ensure that they have the needed technology, services, and procedures to recover quickly and effectively from a disaster. Technologies such as cloud-based IT infrastructure, SaaS, server virtualization, and storage virtualization are providing new options for datacenter deployments and dramatically changing the landscape for business continuity. The Doyenz solution leverages most of these technology trends. If Doyenz can overcome the challenges outlined in this paper, IDC believes that the company can be successful in providing business continuity and disaster recovery solutions to the service provider market. A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I ON This publication was produced by IDC Go-to-Market Services. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Go-to-Market Services makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee. C O P Y R I G H T A N D R E S T R I C T I O N S Any IDC information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests, contact the GMS information line at or gms@idc.com. Translation and/or localization of this document requires an additional license from IDC. For more information on IDC, visit For more information on IDC GMS, visit Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F IDC 5