2021 Predictions for Business Continuity and DR

By Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience at SIOS Technology

For some time now, we have been watching business interest in cloud computing grow as vendors expand its backbone across the global landscape, an ecosystem of applications, virtual machines and IoT devices processing data and monitoring and maintaining our business continuity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not interrupted this growth. If anything, organizational interest and speed of adoption has dramatically accelerated. During this period, many organizations wondered whether their business continuity strategy was sufficiently robust to withstand the ensuing chaos.

During 2021, your business continuity and continued economic success will be driven by your organization's ability to protect mission critical application processing with High Availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions that include cloud and non-cloud solutions.

Enterprises will Migrate More Mission-Critical Applications, ERPs, and Databases to the Cloud

As the scalability and flexibility benefits of the cloud continue to be proven, more companies will consider moving infrastructure and applications to the cloud, including their most complex and mission-critical applications, ERPs and databases.

Industry experts continue to believe that the cloud will become the foundation for business innovation and growth as well as technological innovation. The expectations are that it will provide the path to real-time awareness, decision automation, digital twins, and artificial intelligence at better price points than on-premises solutions. This momentum will build as cloud becomes the pervasive, ubiquitous style of computing, replacing non-cloud, legacy applications and infrastructure.

The disruption in business continuity caused by COVID uncovered corporate infrastructure's inability to meet the huge spike in demand for employees to work remotely and continue support for critical applications. The cloud offered an immediate alternative with flexibility to scale capacity - up or down - as needed and at reasonable prices.

As we close out 2020 and enter 2021 there will be no question that business leaders will realize that the cloud is the ultimate way to connect to a vast ecosystem of partners and suppliers that can continue to offer an expansive array of services -  even in the worse markets. Organizations will increasingly use cloud services to create agile, innovative business solutions aligned with their core competencies, and democratize access to the latest technology and services for customers, suppliers and partners.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Will Drive Adoption of Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud Configurations

As Cloud adoption takes center stage in IT infrastructure configurations, organizations will begin using more hybrid and multi-cloud configurations to solve long-standing challenges to business continuity and disaster recovery.

90% of enterprises will rely on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, several public clouds and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs by 2021. 40% of their datacenter investments will be associated with running composite applications that need reliable/secure interconnection to third-party resources in cloud or colocation facilities in 2020. IDC Research

Because there is no "one-size-fits-all" cloud solution, utilizing hybrid or multi-cloud environments and selecting options from different service offerings will provide the best fit with your HA and DR objectives.

MarketsandMarkets forecasts the multicloud management market is estimated to be $4.493 billion in 2022, a CAGR of 30.9 percent from 2017. Similarly, Verified Market Research notes similar growth in adoption of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) from $4.75 billion in 2019 to a projected CAGR of 41.6 percent from 2020 to 2027 to total $38.91 billion.

Companies will use the cloud to enable geographically separated offsite replication or failover for disaster protection. They will also look to extend failover clustering not only across cloud availability zones but across different cloud vendors. Private cloud usage will grow with the AI services and IoT devices monitoring the sprawling application ecosystem.

These options will further allay organizational concerns that cloud services cannot meet the High Availability SLAs for mission-critical applications now found in on-premises (e.g., 99.99%). Hybrid solutions are already capable of meeting that specification. As adoption to cloud services expands, more of these solutions will become available as users demand them.

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About the Author

Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience, SIOS Technology

Cassius Rhue leads the Customer Experience team at SIOS Technology responsible for customer success spanning pre-sales, post-sales and professional services engagements. With over 19 years of experience at SIOS and a keen focus on the customer, Cassius' significant skills, and deep knowledge in software engineering, development, design, and deployment specifically in the HA/DR space are instrumental in addressing customer issues and driving their success. Cassius has a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Computer Engineering from the University of South Carolina - Columbia, SC.