This should be a question that any corporation utilising large spaces of data centres can now ask themselves knowing that there is a more than suitable alternative solution. Large and complex overheads are always associated with data centres. Just getting a piece of hardware in, configured and online can sometimes take weeks or in some cases months. At some stage that hardware will need to be upgraded or replaced, which means more labour and paperwork. What happens when you need to expand and your allotted space is full? Even more complicated networking and hardware placement in a different area of the data centre, if that is even available.
These difficulties are not news to anyone who has been dealing with data centres for any amount of time. No doubt then that a move to cloud has been considered at some point, and potentially been shot down or put on hold for one reason or another. One of the major deal breakers for clients has been the fear of cloud not performing to expectations or the bills being far higher than cost forecasts predicted. We know how easy it is to spin up a test environment and shut it off when it’s not needed, but what happens when I migrate my production systems to cloud? What happens if there is then, for example, a change in company policy and I need that system migrated back out? I’m stuck, right? Once you’ve migrated in, they’ve got you. That has been the image of migrating to cloud, but that issue has now been removed.
If you have thought about a move to cloud and you haven’t heard of Zerto, you might want to read up as you will more than likely find that their software will resolve many of your flexibility, security and resiliency issues with a cloud move. In particular, with the release of Zerto Virtual Replication 5.5 comes the first solution on the market to provide replication and recovery of enterprise applications, both to and from Microsoft Azure. This new feature enables reverse protection and failback of any workloads to vSphere or Hyper-V environments with RPOs of seconds and RTOs of minutes. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has not been forgotten of course, the new release delivers RTOs 6x times faster than before significantly reducing recovery times when failing over VMs and applications to their cloud platform.
Utilising Microsoft Azure APIs, Zerto can move workloads from Microsoft Azure to your on-premises VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V data centre with automatic on the fly VM conversion. This means that now companies can incrementally adopt cloud strategies by securely testing production workloads to evaluate performance in the public cloud, before migrating individual applications as needed to achieve the best balance of cost and performance. There has never been a better time to investigate whether cloud is a worthwhile investment for your environment knowing that you can migrate your workloads straight back to their original location if expectations are not met.
Now you have more viable options. Do you still really need your DR data centre? Cloud based infrastructures are the way of the future so why not use Zerto to get your hybrid cloud model up and running now? If you are not convinced yet that everyone is migrating, have a look at these figures from McAfee’s “Building Trust in a Cloud Sky” report:
- Hybrid cloud adoption grew 3x in the last year, increasing from 19% to 57% of organisations surveyed
- 93% of organisations are currently using cloud services of some type
- In 15 months, 80% of all IT budgets will be committed to cloud solutions
These figures are helped by products like Zerto making more business requirements achievable and sustainable for a move to cloud. There is no business that would not love to wash their hands of their secondary DR data centre, and even their primary data centre for that matter. It is now easier than ever to remove maintenance of your expensive data centres and make the move to cloud, knowing all can be reversed if required.
If you are interested in giving Zerto a trial and finding out how it can best benefit you, contact Diaxion to get an experienced Consultant out to design and implement a demonstration. It’s time to begin your cloud journey!
