As a VAR, DR seemed like an ideal solution since it included multiple products and was relatively complex so it would drag a decent amount of PS. But it was always a tough sell. Customers were usually clueless about what a good disaster recovery solution entailed, but getting them to pay anything to resolve this problem was very difficult. You could say they “didn’t know what they didn’t know,” namely, that they had a problem, and therefore were less apt to spend anything on it.

One way to sell DR is to get users to focus on the negatives, the risks they’re running, the cost of downtime, etc. This is the approach everyone takes after a hurricane, like Sandy or Katrina, and was particularly popular after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks. But people have strong denial skills and just aren’t compelled by potential pain to themselves when it’s exemplified by the misfortune of others. Part of the reason may be that the solution has more than a little pain itself.

This is another example of the pain-of-change equation. If it’s more disruptive, expensive, etc., to do nothing than it is to fix a problem, people do nothing. Testing a traditional DR system can be disruptive and expensive as it often requires after-hours work by a number of people at the primary and remote locations and maybe some application downtime as well. It would follow, then, that making DR testing quick and easy is a good way to lower that pain-of-change delta and get people interested in a  disaster recovery solution.

Hybrid cloud DR systems allow customers to back up their application servers to the cloud as VM images and then restart those virtual machines on host servers in the cloud. These systems have the added benefit of making DR testing almost trivial. Users can start these virtual servers in the cloud with a couple of mouse clicks. This can significantly lower the pain of running a DR solution and potentially make it an attractive topic to bring up with customers. 

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Humans are reactive, not proactive, except in terms of the next event. After each of these disasters, there was certainly a heightened awareness and some action taken by companies, but it’s safe to say that fewer companies took the lessons of disaster preparedness to heart and actually implemented credible DR plans.

Part of the reason is that credible disaster recovery planning has historically been expensive and complex. Starting with offsite vaulting of backup tapes and evolving through disk backup, deduplication and WAN-optimized replication, up until recently DR solutions have remained beyond the means of most SMBs. Now, however, technology may have come to the rescue. The cloud and widespread server virtualization have created a real DR solution that most companies can afford.

Hybrid cloud backup combines cloud backup with an onsite appliance that takes backups from local servers and then facilitates their transfer to the cloud. When this appliance is designed to take backed-up virtual machine images and even perform physical-to-virtual conversion when backing up standalone servers, a real recovery capability is born. Downtime is reduced to almost zero since these VM images can then be restarted on the backup device. When the appliance synchronizes itself with the cloud, where a compute platform is available from which to start and run those VMs, it becomes a real DR solution.

This “hybrid cloud DR” is being offered by many of the same companies that provided hybrid cloud backup and is becoming a part of more and more storage appliance offerings, as an optional service. This means good things for SMBs since it promises to bring costs down further, although hybrid cloud DR is already in a separate class from “traditional” DR solutions, from a cost and complexity perspective. It’s also good news for VARs, especially those that can offer the cloud service as well.

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Management usually drives requirements for IT to be up to speed on a lot of things, like disaster recovery planning, regulations and compliance, green IT initiatives, etc. Due to a lack of time, resources, interest and/or a pressing need (“if it ain’t broke …”), IT folks just don’t get around to researching and learning all that they would like to — or all that they’re responsible for. So what happens? They go through the motions, or “check the box.” They don’t like it but usually don’t have a choice; as I mentioned, there’s “so much to know, so little time.”

Examples of this can be found in the area of disaster recovery; do they have a real plan in place that’s tested and kept up to date? Or it could be compliance; what are the pertinent regulations they need to be aware of, and how does their infrastructure really need to change to support these regulations? Or maybe they’re responsible for a green IT initiative; have they implemented infrastructure that’s really lowering their overall power footprint?

The opportunity for VARs here is to understand how companies do go through the motions in some of these areas and that it can be a pain point for IT. They need help, like improving their disaster recovery plan to make sure they’re still effective, or using e-discovery tools to index existing data and support the legal department’s compliance needs, or implementing new MAID technologies that apply to more than just backup data, for a green IT initiative. Customers may tell you they have a system in place, but it doesn’t mean they’re comfortable with it or that they don’t want to hear about an alternative to it.

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