Confused about RTOs and RPOs? Fuzzy about failover and failback? Wondering about the advantages of continuous replication over snapshots? Well, you’re in the right place. The Disaster Recovery 101 guide will help you learn about DR from the ground up and assist you in making informed decisions when implementing your DR strategy, enabling you to build a resilient IT infrastructure.

This 101 guide will educate you on topics like:

• How to evaluate replication technologies
• Measuring the cost of downtime
• How to test your Disaster Recovery plan
• Reasons why backup isn’t Disaster Recovery
• Tips for leveraging the cloud
• Mitigating IT threats like ransomware

ESG research recently uncovered that 66% of organizations view their IT environments as more or significantly more complex than they were two years ago. The complexity will most likely increase, since 46% of organizations anticipate their network infrastructure spending to exceed that of 2018 as they upgrade and expand their networks.

Large enterprise and service provider networks consist of multiple device types—routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers—with proprietary operating systems (OS) and different configuration rules. As organizations support more applications and users, their networks will grow and become more complex, making it more difficult to verify and manage correctly implemented policies across the entire network. Organizations have also begun to integrate public cloud services with their on-premises networks, adding further network complexity to manage end-to-end policies.

With increasing network complexity, organizations cannot easily confirm that their networks are operating as intended when they implement network and security policies. Moreover, when considering a fix to a service-impact issue or a network update, determining how it may impact other applications negatively or introduce service-affecting issues becomes difficult. To assess adherence to policies or the impact of any network change, organizations have typically relied on disparate tools and material—network topology diagrams, device inventories, vendor-dependent management systems, command line (CLI) commands, and utilities such as “ping” and “traceroute.” The combination of these tools cannot provide a reliable and holistic assessment of network behavior efficiently.

Organizations need a vendor-agnostic solution that enables network operations to automate the verification of network implementations against intended policies and requirements, regardless of the number and types of devices, operating systems, traffic rules, and policies that exist. The solution must represent the topology of the entire network or subsets of devices (e.g., in a region) quickly and efficiently. It should verify network implementations from prior points in time, as well as proposed network changes prior to implementation. Finally, the solution must also enable organizations to quickly detect issues that affect application delivery or violate compliance requirements.