The Opportunity with Disaster Recovery

In today's world, having a disaster recovery solution in place can mean the difference between a business with a bright future and one that closes up shop. As recent natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy or the Fukushima earthquake have taught us, catastrophes can strike at a moment’s notice.

Having a workable, well-thought-out disaster recovery plan is a crucial piece, allowing a business to get back on its feet and quickly recover following a catastrophe or unplanned shutdown. This is especially critical because approximately 25 percent of businesses that are affected by a disaster fail to reopen, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Today, most organizations only back up data only once every 24 hours or longer. In a disaster, this means hours or days of data can be lost, and can take hours or days to restore data from backups. An effective disaster recovery strategy (continuous replication) offers a much higher level of protection, allowing an organization to set a recovery point measured in minutes or hours, and the organization can quickly restart applications rather than having to restore them from storage. In today’s market, many small-to-medium-sized businesses simply don’t do disaster recovery at all because they believe implementing disaster recovery would be either too complicated, too expensive or both.

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery is a new disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solution that introduces native cloud-based disaster recovery capabilities for VMware vSphere virtual environments. Simple to set up, it provides a high level of self-service capabilities while requiring minimal configuration and user training, and is a fraction of the cost of traditional disaster recovery solutions. Built on VMware’s hypervisor-based replication engine, vSphere Replication, and new integration support with vCloud Hybrid Service, Disaster Recovery features include:

This new disaster recovery service is ideal for organizations that don’t want to have to build and maintain tertiary disaster recovery sites. It’s also useful for organizations that want to protect more applications from data loss and downtime during a disaster, but cannot justify the cost and complexity of traditional disaster recovery.
With only 5 percent of today’s applications protected by disaster recovery, Gartner predicts that midsize enterprises are the expected growth market for recovery-as-a-service. Turning to a cloud-based service means a midmarket organization can shift costs to OpEx with no additional CapEx investments, leveraging deployment timeframes that are shorter with no additional data center to support. This presents an incredible opportunity for solution providers to extend their services to include a recovery-as-a-service offering and support customers on their business continuity needs.

Become a Channel Partner
The VMware Hybrid Cloud Solution Competency provides the foundational training required for partners to sell VMware vCloud Hybrid Cloud Service, giving partners the opportunity to participate and gain influence in the cloud and disaster recovery discussions with customers.

Why Participate in the Hybrid Cloud Solution Competency?

What are requirements?

To qualify for the Hybrid Cloud Solution Competency you need to first be at the VMware Partner Network Enterprise or Premier Partner tier level. To attain the Hybrid Cloud Solution Competency, your company must complete the Subscription Services Authorization Agreement and then participate in self-paced eLearning courses: two individuals for Sales, two individual sets for Technical Sales and one Subscription Expert accreditation before being able to transact on this service.

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Vivian Chan is director, Hybrid Cloud Partner Marketing, at VMware. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly , and are part of Talkin' Cloud's annual platinum sponsorship.