To meet the rising demands of IT infrastructures, businesses of all sizes, from SMB to the largest enterprises, are embracing the cloud. But a one-cloud-fits-all strategy is not the norm.
By evaluating workloads across an IT environment and assessing requirements like performance, infrastructure compatibility, security and compliance, and strategic fit, businesses are choosing a mix of cloud deployment models to maximize the benefits of cloud across private, public, and hybrid environments.
For many small to midsized businesses, they are turning to a cloud-first strategy, often abandoning completely the need for an on-premises data center. Enterprises are taking a multi-provider approach to the cloud to drive innovation. And all sizes of businesses are looking at a hybrid model that has data residing in a hybrid environment. The end result is a multi-cloud strategy. In fact, based on recent studies, 81% of enterprises are embracing a multi-cloud strategy with a mix of solutions across private, public, and hybrid cloud — across multiple providers.[1]
Now the challenge becomes: how to ensure data and apps are always available across this multi-cloud model so that you never skip a beat when it comes to innovating and providing services to your customers.
We know this can be a challenge as:
- 66 % of enterprises admit that digital transformation initiatives are being held back by unplanned downtime [2]
- $21.8M is an average financial cost of Availability and Protection Gaps for the enterprise [3]
- 60% of U.S. businesses that experience a cyber-attack suffer the consequence of data loss [4]
Veeam understands the opportunities and implications of a multi-cloud environment and has built an entire cloud strategy around protecting customers’ data, whether it is on premises, in a hybrid model, or residing in the cloud.
Our relationship with multiple cloud providers ensures our customers can choose a cloud vendor and be assured Veeam will be there to protect the data.
A perfect example of this relationship is the strength of the partnership between Microsoft Cloud and Veeam. When Mark Russinovich, CTO for Microsoft Azure, spoke onstage at VeeamON 2017, he clearly laid out that Veeam is a trusted partner for Microsoft.
Alasdair Thomson, IT Director College Success Foundation, says:
“When you use Veeam, it’s less about where data sits and more about visibility, access and control. That’s why we love Veeam — we can ensure availability of data on-premises and in Microsoft’s cloud. Combining Microsoft and Veeam is a win-win all around.”
While the cloud has continued to expand into every business of every size, there are still challenges for IT departments.
To overcome these challenges, here are three key cloud Availability best practices to consider:
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- Leverage the cloud for backup and disaster recovery of your on-premises data: With any Availability strategy, it’s important to take a 3-2-1 approach, meaning that there are at least 3 copies of your data, 2 of which are local but on different mediums, and at least 1 offsite copy. With a multi-cloud strategy, you are in an ideal position to take advantage of the cloud to help execute a 3-2-1 approach and optimize any legacy backup systems with the cloud. As an example, with Veeam, you can leverage any public cloud provider, including Microsoft Azure, AWS, and IBM Cloud or a managed service provider to protect your data offsite. You can also leverage the cloud for disaster recovery by replicating your data to the cloud to meet your RTO and RPO requirements.
- Protect your data that’s already in the cloud, whether it’s in an IaaS or SaaS solution: It’s your data, you own it, you control it… and you need to protect it. Take email data retention as an example. Organizations across industries face regulations that require email to be retained for up to 7 years. For highly regulated industries, like the financial services sector, retention periods can go up to a lifetime.[5] If you’re using an email SaaS solution, like Microsoft Office 365, it is critical that you protect the data in the event of an accidental deletion, outage, or malicious attack. You can do this by using an Availability solution like Veeam that copies your data to another location – whether on-premises or to a different cloud data center.
- Replicate and migrate applications and data within your cloud: In a multi-cloud strategy, you’re likely to have “born in the cloud” applications in your environment. In this case, replicating these applications for data protection and recovery will be critical to ensure these apps stay up and running in the event of un-expected downtime. To give you an example, you may currently run your cloud-based app in an IBM Cloud data center located in Houston, Texas. With Veeam, you can easily replicate and migrate this app to any of the 50+ IBM Cloud data centers around the world, whether that’s Dallas, São Paulo, Milan, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hong Kong, or to any data center within your cloud to meet your data protection and migration needs.[6]
With these proven approaches to providing Availability across your multi-cloud environment, you can confidently accelerate innovation without worrying about disruption to your business. To get started with an Availability strategy for your multi-cloud environment, visit veeam.com to check out our solutions.
Sources:
[1] ESG, 2017 Public Cloud Computing Trends, April 2017
[2] Veeam 2017 Availability Report
[3] Veeam 2017 Availability Report
[4] Half of U.S. Businesses Report Being Hacked
[5] Comprehensive Guide to Email Retention
[6] Veeam on IBM Cloud: Bridging the Availability Gap
See More:
- Discover Veeam’s Iaas Backup Solution