Which modern disaster recovery tool is often overlooked?

There are a huge variety of tools that can be used in disaster recovery operations. Some are specifically designed for disaster recovery purposes, while others have a more general IT purpose. However, some of those tools can be put to work in disaster recovery situations, even if they're not specifically designed for disaster recovery.

There may not be any one specific disaster recovery tool that is universally underutilized. Every organization's disaster recovery architecture is unique, and a tool that is well-suited to one environment isn't necessarily going to be a good fit for another. Even so, there are a few different things that could qualify as underutilized disaster recovery tools.

One underused disaster recovery tool that comes to mind is a good performance monitor. Performance Monitor from Microsoft is an example of a utility that was never intended for use in disaster recovery situations but is useful nonetheless.

Most disaster recovery operations involve failing mission-critical workloads over to a public cloud or to a remote data center. These types of operations tend to be complex, and so there is rightfully a tremendous amount of emphasis on making sure that the failover goes as planned. The problem is, however, that a successful failover may not matter all that much if the disaster recovery environment performs so poorly that workloads become borderline unusable.

If this sounds like an unrealistic situation, remember that disaster recovery hardware may be loaded more heavily than production hardware because of all of the workloads that have to be run. Using performance monitoring as a disaster recovery tool can help you to determine whether or not performance bottlenecks will impact the hardware's ability to efficiently run the intended workloads in times of disaster.

Another example of a disaster recovery tool that tends to be underutilized is a virtual machine (VM) converter. For most organizations, public clouds are by far the least expensive platform for hosting disaster recovery workloads. However, there are challenges with making on-premises VMs run in the public cloud. Typically, significant modifications to the VM are required. However, utilities exist that can automatically create modified versions of your VMs in the cloud and keep those cloud VMs up to date so that they are ready to be used at a moment's notice. CloudEndure is an example of such a utility.