In an era where companies increasingly depend on computer systems for their functioning, data protection and business continuity are elements that must necessarily be taken into consideration. Unforeseen events such as natural disasters, hardware failures, cyber attacks and human errors can cause disruption of IT services, resulting in significant financial losses. This is where the Disaster Recovery plan comes into play (DR), that allows companies to quickly restore IT services and minimize the impact of unexpected events on the business. For large companies with heterogeneous and complex IT environments, it can be particularly challenging to activate a Disaster Recovery plan. This article explains how Azure VMware Solution (AVS), thanks to its characteristics, can be the ideal solution for developing a Disaster Recovery plan quickly and easily.
The importance of a DR plan in the company
The presence of a good Disaster Recovery strategy may seem obvious, but many companies continue to neglect its importance. Among the main factors to be considered for the DR we find:
- Business continuity: DR plan allows companies to quickly restore IT systems, minimizing the impact of unforeseen events and ensuring business continuity.
- Minimization of financial losses: IT service outages can cause significant financial loss. The DR plan allows you to minimize these losses, restoring IT systems as quickly as possible.
- Regulatory compliance: many regulations require companies to have a DR plan in place to protect data and ensure business continuity.
- Customer trust: business continuity is an important factor in customer trust. A DR plan can demonstrate to customers that the company can handle unexpected events and ensure continuity of services.
Challenges to face in the activation of a DR plan
The importance is understood, however, it is true that companies often find themselves facing various challenges when they have to activate a Disaster Recovery plan (DR). Some of the more common challenges are:
- Recovery site availability: usually Disaster Recovery (DR) is activated at a dedicated recovery site separate from the corporate headquarters. This recovery site may be located in a different geographical area to provide greater protection against catastrophic events that could affect the geographical area where the company headquarters is located. The recovery site must be adequate, equipped and configured to support critical business operations, so that these can be restored as quickly as possible.
- Recovery times: the time it takes to restore IT systems is one of the biggest challenges in the event of a service outage. Businesses must do everything possible to reduce downtime and restore IT services as quickly as possible.
- Data access: in the event that the IT service disruption is caused by a natural disaster, a cyber attack or human error, access to data may be compromised. It is important that businesses protect their data and that backups are kept in a safe place, to ensure the recovery of information.
- Staff training: company personnel must be adequately trained to be able to manage recovery procedures effectively. This requires an investment in staff training and development.
Introduction to the adoption of Azure
Microsoft Azure was designed from the ground up to help customers reduce costs, complexity and to improve the reliability and efficiency of your IT environment.
Figure 1 – The comprehensive approach to building an infrastructure designed for different workloads
There is no one-size-fits-all way to adopt cloud solutions, but it makes sense to give customers the ability to embrace the cloud at their own pace, in some cases even adopting the same technological solutions that they are currently using in their on-premises environment. Provide platform symmetry (on-premises – cloud), where appropriate, it is useful for addressing workload migration scenarios, but also to activate Disaster Recovery plans.
In this article it will be considered Azure VMware Solution (AVS) the designed service, built and supported by Microsoft, and approved by VMware, which allows customers to use physical VMware vSphere clusters hosted in Azure.
Azure VMware Solution: why use it for Disaster Recovery
Azure VMware Solution is a service that allows the provisioning and execution of an environment VMware Cloud Foundation full on Azure. VMware Cloud Foundation is VMware's hybrid cloud platform for managing virtual machines and orchestrating containers, where the entire stack is based on a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI).
Figure 2 – Azure VMware Solution overview
This architecture model ensures consistent infrastructure and operation across any private and public cloud, including Microsoft Azure. The solution Azure VMware allows customers to adopt a full set of VMware features, with the guarantee of holding the validation "VMware Cloud Verified". This solution helps to achieve consistency, performance and interoperability for existing VMware workloads, without sacrificing speed, scalability and availability of Azure global infrastructure. Among the main scenarios of adoption of Azure VMware Solution we find the Disaster recovery.
Talking to enterprise customers, we see a variety of drivers driving the adoption of a solution such as Azure VMware Solution to activate an effective DR strategy:
- Speed: AVS allows you to implement DR plans quickly and efficiently thanks to a hybrid cloud architecture, virtual machine replication and advanced automation features you can adopt. These elements allow companies to reduce the time required to activate a DR plan and to restore critical operations in the event of a disaster.
- Costs and complexity: Azure VMware Solution can help reduce the cost of setting up a disaster recovery site (DR). In fact,, AVS enables companies to extend their on-premises VMware solutions to Azure, creating a hybrid cloud DR environment that offers flexibility and scalability. Instead of purchasing expensive hardware and infrastructure for a separate DR site, companies can use Azure as a recovery site and pay only for the cloud resources they actually use while enabling DR. This allows companies to reduce the initial costs of DR activation and to simplify the IT infrastructure with consequent benefits also from the point of view of maintenance. Furthermore, thanks to AVS it is possible to resize the infrastructure dynamically, based on your needs, and ensure greater operational efficiency.
- People, processes and tools: AVS lets you leverage your existing investments in skills and tools to manage your on-premises VMware environments. To implement disaster recovery plans using Azure VMware Solution, it is possible to adopt native VMware solutions or third-party solutions. In fact,, Microsoft, in order to guarantee its customers the opportunity to make the most of the investments made in skills and technologies, has collaborated with some of the main partners in the sector, to ensure integration and support. For more information on this, you can consult the article "Disaster recovery with Azure VMware Solution – Cloud Community".
Conclusions
Azure VMware Solution represents an ideal solution to address Disaster Recovery cases (DR), for enterpise realities, thanks to its flexibility, scalability and reliability. Using this solution, companies can create environments in Azure that are compatible and integrated with on-premises VMware infrastructure, ensuring business continuity and emergency recovery in the event of a disaster. Furthermore, the solution allows you to simplify and automate DR management, reducing costs and increasing recovery speed. Therefore, if you are looking for a solution to implement efficient and effective DR plans, Azure VMware Solution is definitely a solution to consider.
