Backup and disaster recovery technology are facing constant change and new challenges

In the world of backup and disaster recovery, technology is facing constant change and new challenges. These solutions are critical for organizations that want to maximize uptime and protect themselves from threats such as cybercrime and natural disasters. As Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions has outlined, “By 2022, 40% of enterprises will have replaced their backup and recovery solutions deployed in 2018.” This statistic underscores the importance of timely updates to backup and disaster recovery plans. When businesses are running, they must have up-to-date backup and disaster recovery deployments to ensure rapid recovery in the event of a disaster.

Despite the fact that backup technology has been around for many years, the field has undergone significant changes and challenges over the past two years. Today’s top vendors are primarily focused on centralized management, ransomware resiliency and detection, support for public cloud backups, instant recovery for databases and virtual machines, and subscription licensing. In addition, leading vendors have begun to increase investment to develop the ability to protect cloud-native workloads and to include SaaS applications as part of their backup strategies. These changes illustrate the ongoing growth of the cloud, which has had a significant impact on the backup and disaster recovery market in recent years.

The traditional Backup and DR tools are no longer suitable for the current hybrid cloud market

As the rapid development of cloud computing continues, enterprises are gradually shifting their business architecture from a single traditional on-premise infrastructure to a more complex hybrid cloud infrastructure. However, traditional Backup and DR tools are no longer suitable for the demands of the hybrid cloud market.

· Traditional Backup and DR solution is complex, long cycle and expensive

Many traditional Backup and DR solutions in the market adopt a 1:1 prepared computing resource approach, resulting in high costs and redundant investments; most enterprises consider disaster recovery costs to be too high. In addition, the majority of these solutions rely on a combination of tools, scripts and manual labor for operations such as agent installation, driver adaptation and business recovery. The more hosts there are, the longer the cycle and the lower the efficiency.

· Only few backup and disaster recovery tools that are compatible with different architectures

In the global market, there is a variety of cloud-based resources, including IDCs, public clouds, private clouds, dedicated clouds and traditional virtualization vendors. There are approximately 30+ different vendors with multiple versions in the market. It is difficult to find backup and disaster recovery tools that are compatible with different architectures simultaneously, making it challenging for data to flow freely across different platforms.

This highlights that cross-architecture backup and disaster recovery is the primary challenge facing backup and disaster recovery in the era of hybrid clouds. To achieve cross-platform backup and disaster recovery, backup and disaster recovery tools need to address the following issues:

Data format compatibility:

Different architecture platforms may have different data formats, so data format compatibility needs to be implemented in backup and disaster recovery tools to ensure that data can be correctly parsed and recovered during data transmission and recovery.

Virtualization technology:

Utilizing virtualization technology to virtualize the entire system to enable migration and recovery between different architectures. For example, the entire system can be packaged into a virtual machine image file using virtual machine imaging, and then the virtual machine image file can be restored to the target platform using virtualization technology.

Software adaptability:

When conducting disaster recovery between different architecture platforms, the adaptability of the operating system and applications needs to be considered to ensure that applications can run properly on the target platform.

Scalability:

Backup and disaster recovery tools need to be scalable so that they can be extended to new platforms when conducting disaster recovery between different architecture platforms. For example, support for the new platform needs to be added to the backup and disaster recovery tools to ensure that backup and recovery can be performed on the new platform.

Utilizing cloud-native capabilities to enhance data mobility

As enterprises move more of their workloads to the cloud, their disaster recovery strategies can also benefit from the capabilities that cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provides. This can enable more flexible data protection and business continuity without being limited by traditional methods.

· Cloud-native API capabilities:

Through cloud-native APIs, users can access various cloud resources without needing to be concerned about the underlying implementation. This simplifies operations, increases ease of use, and reduces operational pressure on the underlying infrastructure.

In terms of storage and data processing, cloud APIs can be used for data storage, retrieval and processing, as well as the creation, management and monitoring of cloud computing infrastructure. APIs can also enable identity authentication and access control. All of these capabilities can help developers quickly build and deploy cloud-based disaster recovery applications, while also enhancing automation and user experience.

· Diversified and elastic cloud resources:

Cloud providers offer various types of computing, storage, networking, and other resources to meet the needs of different types of businesses. These resources can be subscribed to and expanded as needed, enabling users to break free from the high costs and resource redundancy associated with traditional disaster recovery strategies that are heavily reliant on storage. By leveraging the cloud as a disaster recovery resource pool, users can achieve on-demand scalability.

Cloud-native backup and disaster recovery solutions provide continuous protection for business continuity

HyperBDR, as a new generation of disaster recovery backup tool, fully utilizes cloud-native capabilities in product design, achieving automated, convenient, and cost-effective business-level backup and disaster recovery.

· Deep integration with cloud-native APIs, supporting one-click recovery of workload to the cloud

HyperBDR deeply integrates with APIs from over 20 cloud platforms, supporting automatic creation and orchestration of cloud resources. It adopts the unique “Boot-in-Cloud” technology to pull up the business system to an available state in the cloud with one click when disasters occur, and pre-injects driver programs to achieve highly automated whole-machine disaster recovery on cloud platforms without the need to pre-launch computing instances. It breaks through the traditional dependence on storage in disaster recovery, and enables free selection of target cloud platforms for backup and recovery, providing higher flexibility in solutions.

· Fully utilizing the characteristics of object storage resources, reducing disaster recovery storage costs by 90%

Based on the full-machine block data backup, we have launched Hostless Data Sync Technology that supports object storage as the target storage medium. Only during recovery, the object storage data is restored to the cloud host, significantly reducing the storage cost by over 90% compared to traditional disaster recovery solutions. This enables more small and medium-sized enterprises to enjoy disaster recovery services at backup costs, making it significant for the promotion of disaster recovery services. Moreover, as cloud service providers generally use the S3 protocol as the interface protocol for object storage, backup data can flow more flexibly between platforms.

· Cloud + HyperBDR, realizing DR as a service

Under the context of cloud computing, DRaaS deployment can be more flexible and cost-effective. Service and cloud providers can fully combine the characteristics of cloud computing, such as elasticity, scalability, multi-region and multi-node deployment, diverse resources, as well as the flexible subscription model of HyperBDR product, to quickly build low-cost disaster recovery backup solutions. This can achieve cross-cloud, same-city, remote disaster recovery and other multi-scenario solutions, meeting the disaster recovery needs of more customers and expanding the disaster recovery market.