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IDC/Zerto - The State of Disaster Recovery and Cyber-Recovery, 2024–2025.

IDC recently published the white paper “The State of Disaster Recovery and Cyber-Recovery, 2024–2025: Factoring in AI” sponsored by Zerto which highlights current trends in disaster protection strategies in the face of growing cybercrime. The paper also presents survey results regarding the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) within data protection and cyber-resilience solutions. Here we examine the key findings of this report and discuss how system recovery solutions from Cristie Software can help users of backup solutions such as Zerto to address the gaps reported by the respondents to this report.

Backup and recovery alone are insufficient for fast, effective Disaster Recovery (DR) or Cyber Recovery (CR).

While backup and recovery (B/R) are foundational to data recovery, a complete disaster recovery solution needs to include the recovery of systems and underlying infrastructure, which in a modern IT environment, invariably involves a hybrid of physical, virtual and cloud platforms. Effective DR may involve moving application services and data to a second site using asynchronous or synchronous data replication, replicated infrastructure, plus application failover/failback processes between these diverse operating environments. CR builds upon B/R and DR processes with additional requirements for malware detection, forensic analysis, cleanroom recovery, and more. For this reason, backup modernization was among the top 3 IT initiatives for respondents to the survey over the next 12 months. When asked about the most important criteria when selecting backup and DR tools, the top response was “breadth of solution” indicating that companies are looking to modernize their entire B/R and DR toolset and processes.

How does Cristie Software help with B/R, DR and CR modernization?

Cristie Software recovery and replication solutions complement B/R solutions like Zerto and other leading solutions from vendors such as IBM, Dell Technologies, Rubrik and Cohesity. Our software works seamlessly with B/R solutions to deliver many benefits.

  • Physical system recovery automation: Physical systems present the biggest system recovery administration overhead due to the frequent need for manual intervention. Cristie Software can automate the physical system recovery workflow eliminating manual intervention and facilitating automated physical system recovery at scale.
  • Physical, virtual or cloud recovery & replication, in any direction: Although modern B/R solutions can utilize both on-prem and cloud targets, the addition of Cristie Software provides complete omni-directional system recovery between physical, virtual and cloud targets with features such as automated resource provisioning and dissimilar hardware technology. With many companies looking to move DR to the cloud, having complete flexibility over source and target system direction is a vital feature to include in any B/R modernization plan.
  • Cleanroom recovery: The addition of Cristie Software allows recovery to isolated networks to assist cyber forensics or facilitate backup integrity verification in isolation from the production environment.

Human factors impacting B/R, DR and CR: Staff availability, skills shortages and human error.

The IDC survey highlights that IT personnel time and resource availability plus IT skills are in the top 3 biggest challenges organizations face with respect to disaster recovery. Human error was shown to be the biggest reason for data loss. Cristie Software can help to address each of these human factors through features such as automation, recovery orchestration, and the ongoing use of predictive AI.

  • Recovery automation: By eliminating manual intervention IT resources can be spared and at the same time human error can be reduced.
  • Recovery orchestration: More complex recovery workflows can be implemented through orchestration jobs further reducing IT administration overhead.
  • Recovery failure remediation through machine learning (ML) and AI: Cristie are implementing ML and AI to provide automated recovery job failure remediation plus AI driven administrator guidance within the Cristie Virtual Appliance (VA) to reduce the need for specialist IT system recovery skills.

Organizations need solutions to meet SLAs and provide the fastest recovery with the least data loss.

System recovery time objectives (RTO) differ between organizations and business applications but rarely does system downtime does not equate to revenue loss, therefore the desire to reduce system recovery times featured highly in the survey responses. Meeting internal and external SLAs may require very specific RTOs with regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare having SLAs that incur may penalties if not met. To ensure that system recovery processes are capable of meeting SLAs testing should be a core component of every DR plan. Cristie Software provides several features to assist in recovery testing and verification.

  • Recovery simulations: The simulation of any recovery job can be scheduled to provide a clear indication of the recovery time that the supporting infrastructure is able to deliver. This can provide early warning of network, storage and processing resources that may need need upgrades to meet specific RTOs.
  • Recovery reporting: The Cristie VA serves as the single interface for all tasks and provides comprehensive reporting on recovery and replication job status. These extensive reports can help meet self-assessment and testing requirements that are often mandatory within industry regulations.

Summary

The findings within this report correlate with our experience as customers look to modernize their B/R solutions to support hybrid cloud architectures and multi-cloud environments. Despite the widespread adoption of virtualization, physical systems are still prevalent where application performance is vital, or to support legacy applications, therefore the automation of physical system recovery is an essential feature that organizations should include in their modernization plan. Read the full IDC report sponsored by Zerto here.

Contact the Cristie Software team if you are in the process of addressing any of the challenges highlighted in this article, or to learn more about system replication and our system recovery integration with leading B/R solutions from vendors including IBM, Dell Technologies, Rubrik and Cohesity.

Cristie Software Ltd

New Mill, Chestnut Lane
Stroud, GL5 3EW
United Kingdom

©2024 Cristie Software Ltd. Registered in England & Wales Number: 06395450
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