FEATURE
FEATURE
We encourage our partners
to become Veeam Certified
Engineers so that they can
do their own installations.
This is very important for us.
We have learned a lot about what
organisations want. They want disaster
recovery as a service, the ability to failover
the datacentre or maybe only part of it,
as well as ease of use with regards to the
larger business continuity and availability
practice,” explains Schuck.
Simplifying disaster
recovery through cloud
The multiple products used by Veeam to
provide an end-to-end disaster recovery
solution include:
Modern threats to country and business operations through
disasters can be tackled through innovative cloud solutions.
By Arun Shankar
T
he global landscape is
characterised by two contra-
acting forces. On one side we have
increased environmental, geopolitical,
economic, and sociological upheavals
building up in almost every region. This
is increasing the awareness of nations
and businesses to build resilience and
disaster recovery solutions into their
day to day fabrics of operation. On
the other hand, we also have digital
transformation that is fast penetrating
every industry and every market
segment, as well as cloud becoming a
dominant buzzword.
Says Claude Schuck, Regional Manager
for Africa at Veeam, “The business
continuity and disaster recovery
landscape has changed irrevocably
following the arrival of always-on and
digital transformation. Companies
in Africa are embracing digital
transformation with its associated
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benefits. Veeam is in a position to help
accelerate this availability growth in South
Africa and the rest of the continent.” process, including data restore and
network setup and configuration for
seamless user experience,” Schuck adds.
Data availability solution vendor,
Veeam recognises the new challenges
companies face across the globe in
enabling the always-on enterprise.
To address this, Veeam is helping
organisations meet recovery time and
point objectives of less than 15 minutes
for all applications and data, through
a solution that delivers high-speed
recovery, data loss avoidance, verified
recoverability, leveraged data and
complete visibility. The statistics make for grim reading: at
least one major disaster occurs every
single day, impacting lives or economic
growth, often with grave consequences.
Indeed, regardless of technological,
economic and scientific advancements,
nations the world-over find themselves
vulnerable to all manner of threats.
“When a disaster strikes, businesses
of all sizes need a reliable solution for
on-demand disaster recovery in the
cloud. The cloud makes disaster recovery
affordable for businesses of any size, but
many of them still struggle to properly
manage the complex disaster recovery
In their advisory report: Building
National Resilience, Nabih Maroun,
Executive Vice President at Booz Allen
Hamilton MENA, and Rosa Donno,
Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton
MENA, point out that the negative
consequences of a disaster can be as
much as 20% of that country’s GDP.
Countering them requires no small
measure of investment, but the good
www.intelligentcio.com
news for government is that investment
in shoring up resilience tends to be
well-placed. The British Department for
International Development estimates
that for every dollar allocated to building
or enhancing resilience, the yielding
multiplier ranges from $2.3 to $13.2.
In fact, the popularity of resilience, borne
out of necessity, has given rise to a great
number of frameworks or guidelines that
focus on specific resilience features or
on resilience as a system. The framework
provides a tool for assessing and
measuring resilience at the city scale.
Technology solutions
Amongst the latest innovations being
used in disaster recovery solutions is the
backup and restore of virtual machine
images and the usage of cloud solutions.
“At Veeam, we see a huge focus on
cloud and service provider technologies.
www.intelligentcio.com
Veeam Availability Suite, which includes
Veeam Backup and Replication,
leverages virtualisation, storage,
and cloud technologies that enable
the modern data centre to help
organisations save time, mitigate risks,
and reduce capital and operational
costs. Veeam Cloud Connect makes it
easy for end-users to extend their backup
infrastructure to the cloud. Veeam
Cloud Connect also makes it easy for
service providers to offer hosted backup
repositories or complete backup services.
“Veeam Backup and Replication is the
flagship product. We would do a local
backup using Veeam Backup and then
use Veeam Replication to replicate the
virtual machine to a disaster recovery
site. The disaster recovery site can be
either the customer’s site, third party
site, or from a cloud service provider like
AWS or Microsoft Azure,” elaborates
Gregg Petersen, Regional Director of
Middle East, Africa and SAARC at Veeam.
The process involves making a copy of
the virtual machine image on a remote
storage device, either on the same
network, outside the network, on a cloud-
hosted drive, or with a service provider.
The location of the final storage drive is
decided by the level of disaster recovery
compliance that the user has chosen
to build into the system. Based on the
location of the remote storage device
where the virtual machine image has
been saved, the end-user would need
to build alternative remote system to
continue operations.
But now the cloud is simplifying the
process, since a virtual machine image
saved on the cloud is already remote and
secure. This benefits the end-user who
does not need to set up costly alternative
system operations at the remote site and
can access the virtual machine image
saved on the cloud-hosted drive from
any active and operational location.
The access is provided through a virtual
private network. Hence by using the
cloud as a remote disaster recovery site,
the end-user can restore and continue
operations from any convenient and
suitable operational location.
If the operations at the primary site are
affected, the end-user can operate from
any other location around the globe,
accessing the virtual machine image
saved on the cloud-hosted drive. For this
process, Veeam has built partnerships
with service providers, designated as
Veeam Cloud Service Providers including
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft
Azure. Veeam has also been developing
its portfolio of cloud facing solutions, as
described below, to make this happen.
Disaster recovery and the cloud
Many IT organisations are considering
public clouds such as Microsoft Azure for
new services to reduce challenges with
on-premises data centre. In fact, Backup
as a Service, Software as a Service, and
Disaster Recovery as a Service, markets
are flourishing. Organisations often
struggle with how to pair business
challenges with the ever-expanding
offering in the cloud.
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