Resiliency in the Hybrid Cloud is Critical to Government
INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE Resiliency in the Hybrid Cloud is Critical to Government 1
Introduction Disaster can strike a government IT operation in many ways. Floods, earthquakes or manmade physical attacks can take computer systems down along with physical infrastructure. A work crew could accidentally cut power or data feeds. And a cyberattack could leave a federal agency blind to its own operations by taking down websites and disrupting communications. Because government agencies, like all organizations, rely on data and lines of communications more than ever, a disaster that affects information systems can be as destructive as any physical attack. The first tool in responding to a disaster, of course, is backup – a second set of systems that can provide the data, communications and plans necessary for recovery. But with the evolution of IT systems and agencies’ increasing reliance on them, basic hardware and software backup is no longer sufficient to ensure continual operations. Cloud computing, in particular, has changed the game, giving agencies a more efficient, costeffective way of employing computing resources while allowing the use of multiple platforms and operating systems in a heterogeneous environment. For all of cloud’s benefits, however,
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it does add complexity when it comes to IT operations, and correspondingly can complicate effective disaster recovery. These days, organizations need to look beyond backup to the concept of resiliency, a fullspectrum plan to ensure the quick recovery and accessibility of mission-critical systems. As they say with regard to athletes and injuries, the most important ability is availability. The same principle can apply to backup and recovery, which needs to keep pace with the changing nature of IT. The answer, like the challenge, lies in the cloud, with a hybrid approach that can guarantee quick recovery of those multifaceted systems and enable organizations to meet their service-level objectives, or SLOs, for providing recovery and uptime for a full range of critical systems. To learn more about the importance of a resiliency platform in government, GovLoop, TVAR Solutions and Veritas partnered for this industry perspective. In the following pages, we discuss why government organizations need to think beyond backup and detail the value of a resiliency platform.
Why Resiliency in Government Data Is More Important Than Ever Resiliency Replaces Backup
The Importance of Resiliency
IT administrators might have once been able to think of a backup system as a spare tire – to be taken out and put to use whenever a primary system failed. But that’s no longer a practical approach, for a variety of reasons. For one, backup systems might be located close to a main data center. This means that flooding from a superstorm, for instance, could just as easily take out a backup system along with the data center.
To see the advantages of an effective disaster recovery, consider the computing environment for which it will be providing resiliency. IT operations today tend to consist of a complex mix of platforms and operating systems running in and through the cloud, with multiple vendors hosting application data, all for the benefit of multiple stakeholders who all have their own requirements. Critical applications interact not only with hypervisors, but often also have complex interactions with other applications. In some cases, different tiers within the enterprise can exist in separate locations. All that makes providing 24/7 support and uptime a challenge.
Cost is another factor – and a big one. A backup center represents a significant fixed expense for hardware and software, not to mention the real estate required to house it. Even just moving a nearby backup center farther away from a data center can be too costly for governments with shrinking budgets. The expense of maintaining data and applications also can limit agencies to maintaining only the most mission-critical capabilities. But the definition of mission-critical, too, is changing with the increased reliance on IT systems; agencies are viewing more and more of their capabilities as essential. A study by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that IT administrators are reluctant to allow any IT resource to be offline for very long. Respondents – IT professionals involved in data protection technology decisions – said more than half of their servers had recovery time objectives of less than an hour, but that only 22 percent of organizations are assured of a 90 percent success rate for their recovery tests. Respondents also said that 35 percent of servers had recovery time service-level agreements of 15 minutes or less. Mere backup can’t meet that kind of demand. And, a redundant physical system would add on to that recovery time due to it being in yet another location. What can meet those demands is a hybrid cloud solution such as the Veritas Resiliency Platform 2.0, which provides a unified, automated approach to resiliency operations, proactively managing complex environments to ensure operational uptime. And it can do so on demand, providing Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
In such an environment, old-school tactics such as manual processes or spreadsheets are ineffective. They are unable to provide centralized visibility, create inefficiencies and possibly increase – rather than decrease – the risk of downtime. Some tools in the cloud can integrate backup and replication but only work within virtual environments, as opposed to working across the full enterprise, which leads to a fragmented approach that doesn’t address all of an organization’s SLOs or the interactions among applications. And while employing single, specific solutions for mission-critical applications may seem appealing on a perplatform basis, they too can increase inefficiencies for the overall environment and make it difficult to monitor the overall enterprise. ESG’s study found that employing individual, disparate data protection and availability technologies for databases, hypervisors and other cloud components was fairly common within enterprises.
Organizations should look for a single, comprehensive resiliency strategy, even if it involves incorporating varying tactical methods.
The Veritas Resiliency Platform brings predictability to the matter of meeting recovery time, recovery point and other SLOs within multiplatform and multi-vendor cloud environments, be they private (in-house), public (outsourced) or hybrid (combined on-premise and offsite) clouds.
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The Answer: A Platform for Resiliency Veritas’ Resiliency Platform takes a holistic approach that can ensure organizations meet their recovery time objectives, or RTOs, even when the RTO for critical applications is zero – an increasingly common target for organizations that depend on online transactions. Certain applications, such as those for human resources, may be able to survive some downtime, but the acceptable times for their recovery also are shortening. With its hybrid cloud approach, a resiliency platform can look at the entire enterprise, focusing not on backup, but on resiliency, providing integrated performance across all service-level objectives, addressing the reality that for many organizations, practically any amount of downtime is unacceptable. “Organizations can minimize business disruptions to a few minutes following a major business interruption, and replicate data with typically no more than 15 minutes of data loss,” said Lisa Erickson, Product Management, Resiliency Solutions for Veritas.* * InfoStor.com, Leading Vendors in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), March 07, 2017
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Disaster Recovery Without Borders An undeniable truth of cloud computing is that no system exists in a vacuum. Multiple platforms, applications, tiers and vendors are a part of any successful implementation. Veritas brings that same approach to its Resiliency Platform. Integration with the many facets of a heterogeneous cloud computing environment is a core feature of DRaaS. Resiliency Platform works with both the resiliency mechanisms that already exist on physical servers and in key software applications (such as the database mirroring in SQL Server), and it also integrates with the two most common hypervisor technologies used in cloud systems: VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Resiliency Platform’s unified architecture also supports multiple cloud-based solutions, reinforcing business continuity and disaster recovery efforts. Toward the goal of providing a unified portfolio of data protection capable of handling the multiple tiers of computing operations and the multiple technologies that exist within each tier, Veritas also has integrated its flagship NetBackup solution with Resiliency Platform. NetBackup, the leading backup and recovery solution for enterprise data centers and hybrid clouds, can scale to handle environments up to petabytes in size. It can also put the range of resiliency functions – including tactical backup and restore, strategic replication and availability, and business continuity and disaster recovery initiatives – into a single view for use by multiple stakeholders. Using Resiliency Platform and NetBackup together, in one example, allows for the seamless recovery of tiered applications with different service-level components, such as when a tiered application is relying on replicated data for a database tier while also restoring a middleware tier from backup data. Resiliency Platform’s automation features also allow users to perform bulk restores and recoveries of virtual machines in a single click, enabling the quick, reliable recovery of hundreds of virtual machines.
“The availability pedigree of the Veritas Resiliency Platform is formidable. For more than two decades, Veritas has been producing availability technologies that overlay existing IT infrastructures and are well designed to enhance data availability and increase IT agility.” –Enterprise Strategy Group
Testing without Disruption
Keeping Up With the Cloud
Having a resiliency plan in place is necessary for IT organizations, but peace of mind can still be hard to come by if you must wait until disaster strikes to find out how well it works. Testing your backup and recovery capabilities is essential, but it hasn’t always been easy. The process is labor-intensive and can take some systems offline, which, even if they’re out of service momentarily, is disruptive to users and an organization’s operations. For those reasons, disaster recovery tests tend to be limited to weekends, when operations aren’t running anywhere near capacity.
The need for automated, multi-environment resiliency has resulted from the confluence of several factors, the most important of which is that a hybrid multi-platform solution that can handle complex environments of multiple platforms and multiple vendors is necessary because that’s exactly the type of IT environment that enterprises run. Organizations exist in a world of online transactions, data sharing, data mining and other functions that rely on shared interoperable resources, many of them supplied as a service via the cloud. Any plan for disaster recovery and resiliency must take the same approach, delivering predictably quick recovery of systems, as well as workload migration, failover, failback, data protection and non-disruptive recovery testing.
In order to show an organization’s various stakeholders that operations can be recovered if a disaster strikes during typical business hours, IT administrators need to be able to perform disaster recovery testing at any time. Resiliency Platform enables non-disruptive rehearsals of disaster scenarios to demonstrate the predictability of recovery. As in a real disaster, Veritas provides real-time views of how long it will take to recover services, and provides automated cleanup to get services back online without manual intervention. The process allows organizations to prove Veritas can meet stakeholders’ requirements for recovery times and business continuity.
Veritas Resiliency Platform checks off those boxes, providing: þþ A single solution that offers ease of management across multi-platform, multi-vendor environments þþ A single dashboard that delivers a comprehensive view in real time of the health of all applications, virtual machines, multitier business services and data movers across sites. þþ Shorter times to meeting recovery point objectives (RPOs) þþ Predictability of meeting recovery time objectives (RTOs) and RPOs via automation and orchestration for all resiliency operations
Resiliency is a lot more than just backing up in-house machines or keeping virtual machines running or failing over a key application to back up equipment to keep it running. Replication and backup of data also isn’t enough without a clear plan for employing applications that reduce downtime. Manual processes and point tools provide fragmented views that don’t encompass the enterprise and can increase costs.
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Conclusion Government IT teams are rapidly expanding beyond traditional data center boundaries into the cloud. As mission-critical workloads and data get increasingly run on diverse platforms and across multiple data centers and hybrid clouds, it is imperative for organizations to maintain constant availability of key applications and data. Organizations must proactively deploy a resiliency and availability technology strategy that will complement the restoration and preservation capabilities of their other data-protection solutions – and simultaneously cater to current and future technologies in and out of the data center. With Resiliency Platform, Veritas addresses the entire hybrid enterprise with automation that can provide single-click recovery for applications and data across heterogeneous environments, whether they’re on in-house physical servers, virtual machines or elsewhere in the cloud. By allowing for fast, efficient recovery regardless of the computing environment, it allows organizations to build their data centers however they choose.
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About Veritas Veritas Technologies enables agencies to harness the power of their information to drive mission success, with solutions designed to serve the world’s most complex, heterogeneous environments. Veritas works with Federal agencies to help them improve their data availability and unlock insights to make them more successful in support of the overall mission. From traditional data centers to private, public, and hybrid clouds, Veritas helps agencies protect, identify, and manage data regardless of the environment through a comprehensive product strategy and roadmap focused on Federal agency needs. Veritas’ products help automate information management and reduce manual efforts.
About TVAR Solutions TVAR Solutions was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in McLean, VA. TVAR Solutions is a small business information technology value added reseller that markets exclusively to the Federal Government and its system integrator partners. TVAR Solutions aims to provide innovative solutions that address complex computing infrastructure challenges. For more information, please visit www.tvarsolutions.com.
About GovLoop GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.” We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop connects more than 250,000 members, fostering crossgovernment collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government. For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com. www.govloop.com | @GovLoop
Resiliency in the Hybrid Cloud is Critical to Government 7
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