The State of DR and Cyber Recovery – Part 2: Top Disaster Recovery Challenges and Strategies for Success
In part-1 of our miniseries, we looked at the main reasons behind data loss occurrences and some ways to address them with Zerto. In this post, the second in a series of three that explores insights from the IDC white paper sponsored by Zerto, we’ll focus on the top disaster recovery challenges organizations face, and how to address them.
Top Disaster Recovery Challenges
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, disaster recovery (DR) is more critical than ever. Organizations face myriad challenges, from rapid recovery needs to managing complex infrastructures and ensuring comprehensive protection against evolving threats. Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, sponsored an IDC white paper— The State of Disaster Recovery and Cyber Recovery, 2024–2025: Factoring in AI¹—about the state of modern data protection, disaster recovery, cyber recovery, and AI.
Results from that recent IDC white paper highlighted that when selecting backup and DR tools, the most frequently cited criterion was “breadth of solution” (30%). Speed of recovery was a close second (29%), within the survey’s margin of error. This demonstrates the importance of solutions that address common data recovery scenarios, such as human error, and provide comprehensive DR and cyber resilience (CR). Organizations need solutions that meet SLAs, ensuring the fastest recovery with minimal data loss.
While technology is crucial, the human element is equally significant. The survey identified “IT personnel time and availability” as the top challenge for many organizations, cited by 30% of respondents.
The second-most-cited DR challenge was moving DR to the cloud, emphasizing the need for solutions that support hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The survey also revealed that although 90% of organizations use cloud for some aspect of data protection, over 58% protect fewer than half of their applications with cloud DR.
Whether you are dealing with issues related to human error, backup system failures, or integrating cloud solutions, understanding, and addressing these challenges is key to maintaining business continuity. In the next section, we will explore effective strategies to overcome the most pressing DR challenges, ensuring your organization is well-equipped to handle any disruption and safeguard your critical data.
How Zerto Addresses Top Disaster Recovery Challenges
1. IT personnel time and resource availability
Solution: Zerto automates disaster recovery processes, significantly reducing the time and resources required from IT personnel. With simplified management and minimal manual intervention, IT staff can focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine DR tasks.
2. Moving disaster recovery to the cloud
Solution: Zerto’s platform enables seamless disaster recovery to the cloud, supporting major cloud providers like AWS and Azure. This flexibility ensures that organizations can leverage the scalability and cost benefits of targeted cloud usage without compromising on recovery capabilities.
3. IT personnel knowledge/skill
Solution: Zerto provides an intuitive interface and comprehensive support, making it easy for IT personnel of varying skill levels to manage disaster recovery operations. Detailed documentation, professional services, and training resources further enhance staff proficiency.
4. Recovery time
Solution: Zerto offers industry-leading recovery times with near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs). Real-time replication and automated failover/failback ensure rapid recovery of data and applications, minimizing downtime and business disruption.
5. Disaster recovery site resources
Solution: Zerto reduces the need for extensive physical disaster recovery site resources by utilizing virtual environments and cloud infrastructure. This approach minimizes the cost and complexity of maintaining a dedicated DR site.
6. Disparate/complex infrastructure
Solution: Zerto provides a unified solution for managing disaster recovery across diverse and complex IT environments. Its platform supports various hypervisors, storage types, and cloud platforms, ensuring consistent protection and recovery processes.
7. Recovery orchestration
Solution: Zerto automates the orchestration of recovery processes, enabling seamless and coordinated failover and failback. This automation ensures that all necessary steps are executed correctly and efficiently, reducing the risk of errors and speeding up recovery times.
8. Cost/budget
Solution: Zerto’s software-defined approach to disaster recovery reduces the need for costly dedicated hardware and physical DR sites. By leveraging existing infrastructure and cloud resources, organizations can achieve cost-effective and scalable disaster recovery solutions.
9. Testing
Solution: Zerto enables nondisruptive disaster recovery testing, allowing organizations to validate their recovery plans without impacting production environments. Regular testing ensures that recovery processes are effective and up to date.
10. Workload migration
Solution: Zerto simplifies workload migration between different environments, whether on premises or in the cloud. Its platform supports seamless and automated migrations, reducing downtime and ensuring data integrity during the process.
11. Data transfer/migration
Solution: Zerto’s continuous data protection and real-time replication facilitate efficient data transfer and migration. This approach ensures that data is consistently up to date, minimizing the risk of data loss during migration.
12. Processes/runbooks
Solution: Zerto allows for the creation and automation of detailed recovery runbooks, ensuring that all necessary processes are documented and can be executed consistently during a disaster recovery event. Zerto integrates with your existing processes using APIs to ensure the dots are connected throughout your DR and CR plans.
13. Executive buy-in
Solution: Zerto’s clear value proposition, including improved recovery times, cost savings, and simplified management, helps secure executive buy-in for disaster recovery initiatives. Demonstrating the potential business impact of effective DR capabilities ensures alignment with organizational goals.
By addressing these challenges comprehensively, Zerto enables organizations to achieve robust, efficient, and cost-effective disaster recovery, ensuring business continuity and resilience against disruptions.
In part-3, the final part of this miniseries, we are going to look at what you need to know when choosing a disaster recovery solution. More to learn!
Until then, feel free to get an overview of Zerto, read the IDC white paper, or get in touch with us if you have more specific questions about our solution and how it may help you with your own DR challenges.
Sarah Doherty Senior Product Marketing Manager
