If the pandemic, catastrophic wildfires, record-setting hurricane season, and “murder hornets” of 2020 have taught us anything, it’s to be prepared for any situation. In business, the motto is “hope for the best, plan for the worst.” 

Should some sort of disaster – cyber or otherwise – strike, organizations need to be prepared to maintain business as usual with a strong disaster recovery plan in place. Business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) are two sides of the same coin. 

The Data Management Reality 

It’s no longer enough for your organization to just backup its data. To ensure business continuity and regulatory compliance, and to be ready to execute a rapid recovery in the face of any event, you need a comprehensive, efficient data management strategy.

With a robust and well-architectured data management approach, your organization is safeguarding against potentials like:

  • costly downtime 

  • lost revenue

  • financial repercussions resulting from non-compliance

  • loss of customer confidence and loyalty

  • damage to your brand reputation 

Having the right data management strategy has the added bonuses of increasing innovation, decreasing storage and hardware costs, and freeing up resources. 

In 2020, the volume of data worldwide sat at 59 zettabytes. In 2021, that number is expected to jump to 74 ZB.Data’s exponential growth, combined with the shift away from physical offices, means more future-facing companies are turning to the public cloud for data management and storage. In the second quarter of 2020, for the first time ever, spending on public cloud IT infrastructure surpassed spending on traditional IT infrastructure.2

Data Can Be a Real Pain in the Wallet

Implementing the right DR strategy is critical for companies of every size. The capacity to resume IT operations within your specified recovery time objective (RTO) and at your specified recovery point objective (RPO) is vital to maintaining business continuity. One of the most expensive aspects of executing a DR or data management strategy is the cost of keeping data and applications safely stored and available on demand. 

Historically, companies have spent a great deal of money on both software and hardware for DR sites. They were also heavily reliant on skilled administrators to conduct the complicated and cumbersome manual data backup and recovery processes and maintain the hardware onsite. The IT team, tied up with rudimentary backup and maintenance, was then unable to help advance other business initiatives. Return on investment for recovery sites was extremely low.

In the minds of many, DR wasn’t flashy, it didn’t help with innovation, it stole time from skilled resources, and it didn’t make money, so it was considered a low priority.

Until a disaster happened. 

Then organizations without a proper recovery strategy couldn’t get back on track in a timely manner. Too late, they learned why DR is a business imperative. 

The Shift of Disaster Recovery Strategies in a Hybrid Cloud World

Now, we have more complex IT infrastructures, exponentially more data, and far more operational dependency on that data. The good news is that more organizational stakeholders are seeing the importance of DR and data management for business continuity and compliance (thank you, 2020, and data regulatory bodies such as GDPR and HIPAA for making this case). We are now witnessing more corporate support for DR and a push to accelerate hybrid cloud or cloud-first adoption. 

Enterprise architects, whose time is already stretched thin between solving for innovation, ensuring compliance regulations are met, and keeping the business ship afloat in a data- and technology-driven economy, are too often still combatting legacy solutions or agonizing over implementing hybrid architectures that may appear too complex to protect and monitor. 

It doesn’t have to be that way. 

Rubrik was designed since day one to ensure data is always available and recoverable – regardless of where that data resides. We love hearing about how our customers are untapping loads of new value from their backup data thanks to our automated, policy-driven approach to data management and protection. We recently built on our innovations with our Andes 5.3 release (you can learn about our latest offerings here).

One of my favorite parts of this release is Rubrik’s new support for VMware Cloud on AWS. Let’s take a closer look.

Certified Simplicity for VMware Cloud on AWS 

VMware Cloud on AWS is an integrated cloud offering conjointly built by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware. It lets companies migrate and extend their on-premises VMware vSphere-based environments to the AWS Cloud seamlessly. 

Here’s the terrific news for VMware, AWS, and Rubrik customers – Rubrik is now certified by VMware for VMware Cloud on AWS. It will be easy for customers to take advantage of Rubrik Cloud Data Management (CDM), a software-defined platform that unifies backup, recovery, replication, search, analytics, archival, compliance, and copy data management in one secure fabric across VMware vSphere on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS. 

Protecting your VMware applications is critical, but it doesn’t need to be hard.

KISS Rule: Keep IT Simple and Seamless

“VMware Cloud on AWS offers customers a seamless experience from on-premises to the cloud, simplifies deployment, and eliminates the necessity for partners to refactor solutions for the AWS Cloud,” said Narayan Bharadwaj, VP Product Management, VMware. “Solutions such as Rubrik Cloud Data Management help organizations to simplify their data management strategy, reduce cost, increase productivity, and create operational consistency across environments. Making our customer’s lives easier, keeping their data and applications secure, and helping them innovate and achieve more, is important to Rubrik – and it’s important to VMware.” 

With Rubrik and VMware Cloud on AWS, enterprises manage virtual environments with simplicity and policy-driven automation – it thinks, so you don’t have to. As a result, enterprises can now deliver rapid RTOs, achieve substantial and immediate hard savings, and accelerate application development. 

Rubrik data management enables a policy-driven approach to data protection, delivering:

  • backup and recovery

  • off-site replication and disaster recovery

  • data archiving

  • search & analytics

  • test & development workflows

Automated Tiered Protection and 23x Cost Savings

With Rubrik and VMware Cloud on AWS, you get your data management and DR strategy wrapped up in a single control plane. Our set-it-and-forget-it automation sends designated data to different levels of cloud tiering for significant cost savings. 

Rubrik has partnered closely with VMware since our inception. Supporting this new offering just extends all that goodness into the cloud platform and offers our customers an SLA policy model, a single point of administration, a familiar user interface, and the ability to move workloads between the two platforms seamlessly. It’s Rubrik’s same great product, just another place you can easily use it.

You can learn more on the VMware Cloud Marketplace.

1 Statista, “Volume of data/information worldwide from 2010 to 2024.” https://www.statista.com/statistics/871513/worldwide-data-created/

2 IDC, “Spending on Public Cloud IT Infrastructure Surpasses Spending on Traditional IT Infrastructure for the First Time in the Second Quarter of 2020, According to IDC.” https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS46895020