The New Era of Disaster Recovery

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when applications were simple, and they ran in your data center just down the hallway. There were few moving parts and far fewer malicious actors attempting to hijack your data. It could also take you days or even weeks to restore your systems from an outage. A lot has changed since then, with organizations adopting multi-cloud environments and facing the challenge of protecting them from the same – only more advanced— threats. Protecting and recovering multi-cloud workloads is one of the biggest challenges organizations face today when planning for data resilience. To support our customers’ multi-cloud adoption strategies, we are announcing public preview of bi-directional cross-cloud DR between VMware Cloud on AWS and Azure VMware Solution. Customers running on Azure VMware Solution and VMware Cloud on AWS can conduct cross-cloud DR operations leveraging the capabilities of VMware Site Recovery and Site Recovery Manager. Cross-cloud DR is a powerful proof point of VMware’s commitment to providing cross-cloud services for our customers adopting multi-cloud operations.

The future is multi-cloud. In 2022, 55% of enterprise workloads and 69% of SMB workloads are projected to be in a public cloud.[1] With more data being migrated to multi-cloud environments, there is a new challenge. How are these workloads being protected? What are the SLAs for recovery? Organizations now must balance their data protection capabilities with the adoption of clouds, and this can carry a sizeable operational burden.

At VMware, we are committed to helping our customers overcome these challenges. Over the past 18 months, we have announced support for hyperscalers with VMware Site Recovery Manager, allowing for on-premises DR to supporting hyperscaler services that include Azure VMware Solution, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and Google Cloud VMware Engine. VMware Site Recovery Manager for Hyperscalers supports on-premises-to-cloud DR as well as cloud-to-cloud DR within the same hyperscaler.

VMware Site Recovery supports on-premises-to-cloud DR as well as region-to-region DR on VMware Cloud on AWS and we’ve also recently announced support for VMware Cloud on Dell as a source.

These two solutions together now deliver bi-directional cross-cloud disaster recovery between Azure VMware Solution and VMware Cloud on AWS. Cloud regions are no longer single points of failure so customers can adopt multi-cloud confidently, knowing their data is protected across their Azure VMware Solution and VMware Cloud on AWS environments. Cross-cloud DR allows customers to meet data sovereignty requirements they otherwise could not if their primary cloud provider has just a single region in their geography. With cross-cloud DR, those customers can now recover from disasters by pairing with DR endpoints in Azure or AWS regions in their same geography.

[1] Flexera