By Sazzala Reddy, CTO & Co-founder, Datrium

What Disaster Recovery Will Look Like in 2020

Disaster recovery (DR) should be top of mind for IT decision makers in 2020 given the startling rise of ransomware. Organizations need to look beyond mere prevention and into actively building and testing an effective and failproof DR plan in order to insulate themselves from the devastating financial and reputational effects of an attack.

DR has traditionally been a manually intensive process tying together multiple disparate products, which in turn creates a fragile system with expensive implications for organizations. This problem becomes even worse as workloads are deployed across clouds.

With the advent of hybrid and multicloud deployments, a new breed of backup storage systems is available in the public cloud and it claims to help with disaster recovery. Unfortunately, these types of solutions take multiple days to copy the data from the backup storage system into a primary storage system after a disaster. No business can wait for days for recovery. It's an inconvenient truth for many so-called "DR" providers, but backup does not equal disaster recovery.

In 2020, enterprises will look for a modern new way to gain confidence in their DR strategy - one that can meet the demand for economical and instant disaster recovery - and that will come in the form of cloud DR. Here are my predictions for the coming year:

Ransomware will innovate faster than mechanisms to prevent it.

Ransomware is plaguing the enterprise and it's getting worse, fast. Due to its insane profitability, the proliferation of non-state and state actors, and cybercrimes (including ransomware attacks) will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021. According to the State of Enterprise Data Resiliency and Disaster Recovery 2019 report, nearly 90% of companies consider ransomware a critical threat to enterprise business. Ransomware will be a massive threat to all organizations for the foreseeable future because it is very challenging to detect or prevent, exacerbated by the furious pace of innovation. Prevention would be the ideal course of action, however organizations must prepare for when defenses fail-since they will fail. While the current recommendation from experts is to just pay up the ransom, there is an alternative approach:  every business should investigate deploying a quick data recovery infrastructure that can help instantly roll back the IT environment to its pre-ransomware state and recover from an attack unharmed. Ransomware recovery will become a budget line item for the majority of CIOs in 2020.

Mainstream enterprises will finally embrace DR to the cloud.

Businesses are clamoring for better disaster recovery solutions in the face of escalating threats from natural and human-generated disasters. Using the cloud for DR has been theoretically interesting but physically impractical due to the huge expense of storing large amounts of data in the cloud and the costs and slowness of moving it across the wire in either direction. In 2020, mainstream business will become open to leveraging the cloud as a DR site and will start shutting down their physical DR sites because new cloud DR technologies will make it possible to leverage on-demand cloud resources during a disaster while keeping cloud costs low during the state of normal business operations. While there will be many options for customers to choose from in 2020, they must take caution and make sure to verify claims surrounding recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Cloud DR also provides an opportunity to move to a SaaS software based model. Every product is becoming a SaaS product, and DR is ripe for a SaaS experience as well. 2020 will be the Wild West of cloud DR performance claims.

Business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) strategies will be put to the test.

Business continuity will become even more critical as businesses respond to the always-on requirements of the on-demand economy. Today, IT practitioners still have to manually coordinate a mixed bag of data storage products and applications to prepare for a disaster event; BC and DR have been largely a bespoke process, making them very complex. At the same time, threats continue to grow increasingly advanced, pervasive and unpredictable.

With cybercrime such as ransomware, recovery of a whole data center depends on backups that are typically months old. DR orchestration software generally doesn't have ways to access these when time matters. Simplicity and integration (using snaps with VM-centric catalogs, converging primary and backup storage) trumps per-subsystem optimization that can drift out of compliance easily. In 2020, IT teams must take advantage of new BC and DR innovations or else they will fail to compete in an increasingly treacherous and competitive business climate.

2020: The year of cloud DR adoption

On-premises or in the cloud, disasters can happen for many reasons. Servers can fail, Availability Zones can fail, Regions can fail, data centers can fail, or you can get hit by ransomware. According to the recent State of Enterprise Data Resiliency and Disaster Recovery 2019 report, one in two companies have experienced a DR event in the past two years, and ransomware was the leading cause. These increased threats are causing companies to reconsider their DR plans with more than 88% stating they would shift their DR site to the public cloud if they could pay for it only when they need it. 2020 is slated to be the year of cloud DR adoption as enterprises face the reality that it is no longer if, but when they will be struck by a DR event.

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