In light of current events, many organizations are canceling in-person events and mandating temporary work-from-home policies. They are quickly realizing just how prepared they really are in the wake of unexpected events. In the blog we’ll identify the differences between disaster recovery and business continuity. And we show you the solutions that can help your organization stay afloat in times of uncertainty.
Do you know some reasons for using desktop and app virtualization? Security, eliminating data at rest, working remotely, mergers and& acquisitions, follow-me desktops and apps, and more are all instantly valuable to organizations. Others, like disaster recovery and business continuity, only reveal their value when they’re needed. But what is the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity? While those two use cases might seem the same – after all, both are about enabling users to continue working in the event of a disruption – disaster recovery and business continuity do have their differences.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery refers to an event that affects your infrastructure. Like a tornado destroying a datacenter or a massive power outage. In a disaster recovery scenario, you’ll likely need workloads to spin up quickly in another location. With traditional PCs, companies might use “hot sites” in another location. But that must be maintained and ready in case of an emergency.
These are not only expensive to maintain, but also have to be reasonably close to the users. Moving desktops and applications into the datacenter or to the public cloud allows those workloads to spin up faster. And your employees can access them remotely in the event of a disaster.
What is Business Continuity?
Business continuity refers to situations when the infrastructure is intact, but something is preventing the users from getting to work. Blizzards or hurricanes are good examples. But there are many other reasons why a disruption might force users to stay home.
If a company is using traditional desktops that are only accessible from the office, a disruption of this nature could be catastrophic. But with desktop and app virtualization, users can simply connect to their work desktops and applications from home.
In either case, deploying virtual desktops and applications from the datacenter with VMware Horizon allows your organization to be more flexible and adaptive should a disruption occur. Additionally, if virtual desktops and applications are the primary way users do their job, their experience will be the same regardless of their location, which reduces the impact of disruptions even more.
How Horizon Can Support Both
VMware Horizon Service gives you a platform that is flexible enough to adapt to your day-to-day use cases while providing additional features that support disaster recovery or business continuity efforts. By providing a single pane of glass for management and a common set of cloud-based services, companies can deploy virtual desktops and applications to on-premises vSphere environments, VMware Cloud on AWS, and Microsoft Azure, all at the same time and with the same broad client support and remoting protocols. We also have desktop virtualization offerings on IBM Cloud and partner solutions. This means even more flexibility when you need it the most.
With VMware Horizon, you can quickly deliver an agile desktop virtualization environment to support your users in any situation. Combined with VMware Workspace ONE, your company can ensure consistent user experience, zero-trust security, continuous communications via Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, and – most importantly – uninterrupted productivity.
If you haven’t yet made plans for disaster recovery and business continuity, it may be time to start thinking about how your organization might deal with these potentially disruptive issues.
Looking for more Horizon resources?
Check out these assets below:
• Check the Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure Datasheet
• Tech Zone’s 5 Videos on Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure (including disaster recovery considerations)
• Go to the Horizon 7 Webpage
• Discover all Horizon 7 Hands-on Labs
