Kathy Gibson at VeeamOn Forum in Johannesburg – Organisations are no longer thinking about adopting a cloud strategy, or even adopting a cloud strategy – they are thinking about how to properly manage their data in a multi-cloud environment.
A Veeam survey shows that 81% of organisations are using two or more cloud providers as part of their solution.
“Is this relevant to South Africa?” asks Trent Odgers, cloud and hosting manager at Veeam. “In fact, it’s quite easy for users to get to two or more providers very easily.”
The survey also shows that 53% of those using more than one provider actually use three or more.
They do this to find the best fit for their workloads, balancing features and functionality, Odgers explains.
In the cloud, availability is critical to customer confidence, brand reputation and competitive advantage: 66% of enterprises admit that digital transformation initiatives are being held back by unplanned downtime; 60% of US business that experience a cyber-attack suffer the consequences of data loss; and $$21,8-million is the average financial cost of an outage.
Odgers says Veeam’s hyper-availability platform covers customers when it comes to data protection.
The only way to manage a multi-cloud environment, he says, is through an opex (operating expense) model, with backup as a service and disaster recovery as a service.
IT also has to think about bringing data back from the cloud with a cross-cloud environment.
“Our key message is that wherever your data is, we can back it up; we turn it into something that is fluid and is able to move,” Odgers says.
The 3-2-1 rule comes into force here, he adds. “We follow the rule of: three copies of your data; two media; and one copy offsite.”
Veeam Cloud Connect lets users send data to their cloud provider or to their own infrastructure, safely and securely.
Veeam Cloud Connect Replication for Service Providers enables disaster recovery as a service via a secure multi-tenanted environment, offering failover/failback, automated networking, recovery assurance, seamless integration with the on-premise system and integration with vCloud Director.
A number of customers are already using Veeam to enable an always-on enterprise in a multi-cloud environment, Odgers says.
South Africa’s ContinuitySA is one of these. When the organisation has experienced issues, it has been able to recover quickly and deliver on their customers’ service level agreements (SLAs).