Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2017.  Read them in this 9th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Darin Pendergraft, Vice President of Product Marketing, Quorum

Disaster Recovery will be All About Hybrid Cloud, Security, and Speed of Recovery

There's been a significant surge in cloud adoption for disaster recovery and data backup, but some IT teams are still running traditional on premises architecture with a patchwork of solutions. 2017 will be an important year as businesses look to consolidate and implement more cloud-based DR solutions while juggling their biggest concerns, with security at the top of the list.

Hybrid Cloud Will Balance Cost and Performance for Disaster Recovery
Adoption of cloud based disaster recovery solutions (DRaaS) have rapidly gained popularity due to their flexibility and ease of deployment, slowly tipping the scale over traditional on premises solutions for those that want the efficiency and on-demand availability they provide.  Yet concerns remain over network latency and application performance of pure cloud DR configurations. 

What we see moving forward is companies shifting towards a hybrid cloud model for disaster recovery. This approach enables back up to an onsite appliance for immediate high availability and instant recovery, while adding on a cloud-based service for disaster recovery to eliminate the hassle and expensive upfront investments of a secondary DR site. This hybrid approach allows customers to easily grow in a cost-efficient way without having to invest in additional hardware, IT staff, or office space.  Hybrid cloud offers excellent performance at a great value.

Security Tops the List  
There's been an unprecedented rise in the number of cyber-attacks bombarding both private and public organizations. Everyday there are reports of another data breach or another hack, some of them having happened years ago and not being identified until now.

IT will no longer focus on the traditional protection methods, but will switch to identifying what these breaches look like and what they try to do by identifying the behaviors versus the signatures. Organizations will prepare themselves with constant and deliberate end user training, certifications, oversight tools, third party testing and benchmarking. Companies will also need to implement a layered cyber security strategy, with each layer creating a means to monitor, block, log, trend, and react - to be as effective as possible.  

Fast Recovery Times will be Critical
Backups may be the critical element in triumphing over a cyber-attack like Ransomware, but only if you can beat the criminal's clock. Their payment deadlines are timed to hit before you can recover from tape - because they assume you're relying on an old-school solution that takes hours or even days to recover. But if you can switch to a recent backup in just minutes, you're home free.

It will be a key concern for companies that recovering lost data no longer impacts users and customers, and making sure applications are back up and running as quickly as possible.

Because most businesses can't afford hours without access to valuable customer or company data, the focus for choosing a recovery solution will depend on speed of recovery, and how fast data can be restored to make employees productive again. A pure-cloud solution would be lacking in this department, but hybrid cloud recovery will offer the best of both worlds to ensure a bulletproof DR plan to keep companies running smoothly through 2017.

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About the Author

Darin Pendergraft - Vice President of Product Marketing, Quorum

Mr. Pendergraft is an experienced leader who has worked in technology for over 17 years.  As the Vice President of Product Marketing, he is responsible for messaging and positioning onQ as well as generating industry and market awareness.  Prior to joining Quorum, he was VP of Marketing for SecureAuth.  Prior experience includes product marketing at Oracle, and roles in product management at Quest Software (acquired by Dell but now independent).  Pendergraft holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Geophysics and a Master of Science degree in Geology from the University of California, Riverside.