Happy 2018!

The end of the year is like your birthday – it’s a useful marker to take stock of where you’ve been of the last 12 months and where you might go during the 12 months to come. Disaster recovery is no exception. There are also some major trends that were present in 2017 and that are likely to continue into 2018.

  • Business is going too fast and is getting too complicated for manual disaster recovery to cope. Smaller IT and IT disaster recovery teams compound the problem. Correctly automated procedures to fail over systems to backups, restore data and switch network connections are increasingly the only way forward.
  • Minimisation of RTO and RPO. Business wants more, and it wants it yesterday. While the laws of physics may make negative RTO and RPO (as in time travel) impossible, the pressure is on to decrease time to recover and data loss windows. Systems are continuously getting faster and smarter, and disaster recovery will need to keep pace.
  • DR capability is designed in, from the basic level of replicating data totally within the cloud to sophisticated solutions that also monitor health, performance, and load balancing, and can spin up and spin down virtual machines before you even know there was a problem.
  • Data replication. As cloud storage grows and network connectivity (slowly) improves, it becomes ever more feasible to shoot your data up into the cloud for safekeeping. A truckload of magnetic tape storage may still be the fastest way to move truly huge amounts of data, but the gap is narrowing every day.
  • Service providers. You probably don’t have your own office cleaning staff, you may not have your own accountancy department, and it may be years since you did any manufacturing of your own. Does it still make sense to do your own DR? This is an open question – only you can decide, but once again, there is an observable trend when it comes to DIY or outsourced DR.

Which trends are you aligned with? Which are you trying to buck? Food for thought as we move into the new year!