As data continued to grow in 2018, more and more businesses turned to a cloud disaster recovery strategy to take some of the burden off their data centers.
For disaster recovery news, 2018 was the year of the cloud. Backup vendors expanded their cloud capabilities with new features and products ranging from greater multi-cloud management to software-defined security perimeters for cloud environments.
Similarly, many of our top news stories from 2018 featured companies incorporating disaster recovery to cloud into their processes. Business continuity was the main driver, as many of these customers wanted to ensure operability even in the midst of a hurricane or flood.
From recoveries following major storms to innovative product releases, we dive into the top cloud disaster recovery news stories of 2018, and what they meant for DR.
Vendors enhance cloud capabilities
With customers adopting hybrid cloud or multi-cloud architectures, data protection vendors developed new means to manage and secure those environments. In 2018, many vendors released cloud-centric products or enhanced their existing offerings:
JetStream Software launched JetStream Cross-Cloud Platform, which provides management across multiple VMware-based clouds. The platform has data replication for disaster recovery and disaster recovery as a service, as well as cross-cloud workload migration.
Druva acquired CloudRanger in June and released an automated disaster recovery to cloud product for AWS workloads on the Druva Cloud Platform five months later. The new Druva CloudRanger features periodic DR testing, file searching within backup snapshots and snapshot management.
In 2018, many vendors released cloud-centric products or enhanced their existing offerings.
DH2i released DxOdyssey, security software that quickly and simply creates secure tunnels between hosts and servers without using a virtual private network. DxOdyssey was designed in response to a large increase of DxEnterprise users adopting the cloud and needing a way to secure their workloads.
Arcserve used its Zetta acquisition to launch a direct-to-cloud disaster-recovery-as-a-service product called Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) Cloud Direct. Later in the year, Arcserve launched Arcserve Business Continuity Cloud, a backup and disaster recovery platform that merged the company's UDP, Replication and High Availability, and Backup products onto a single console.
Companies adopt disaster recovery to cloud
For some businesses, cloud failover is a crucial part of their disaster recovery plan. Some of our top news stories from 2018 showed why some organizations chose disaster recovery to cloud over other methods, such as off-site replication or colocation.
Maritz, a marketing firm with over 4,000 employees operating across 10 field offices, turned to Zerto Virtual Replication for AWS and reduced its recovery point objective to a seven-to-10-second window. Zerto's continuous replication and automated failover and failback were big incentives for Maritz.
The first floor of Houston-based GS Marketing's (GSM) headquarters reopened in 2018, after a year of repairs from damage caused by Hurricane Harvey. Disaster recovery to cloud kept GSM afloat, while other nearby businesses were scrambling to pull communications together in the wake of the disaster.
Puerto Rico-based restaurant chain Grupo Colón Gerena (GCG) survived Hurricane Maria thanks to backup workloads on Google Cloud Platform and Scale Computing's HC3 Cloud Unity orchestrating failover. Electricity is spotty as the island continues to recover, but GCG's data remains safe and accessible.
