BC/DR for Cloud-First/Hybrid Cloud Environments

This IDC Perspective discusses business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) for cloud-first and hybrid cloud environments.Migrating systems, data, and workflows to the cloud remains a primary component of digital transformation and infrastructure modernization efforts. Companies migrating to the cloud are primarily doing so in a hybrid cloud model. Overall, digital resilience is heavily impacted by data resilience, which defines all the capabilities around the ingestion, storage, processing, recoverability, and presentation of data. As organizations leverage both on-premises and cloud resources in a hybrid environment, the need for an effective DR strategy becomes an even more critical aspect of a data resilience plan. However, navigating the intricacies of DR implementation in a hybrid cloud environment poses several challenges. Redundancy is a key capability for business continuity, while recovery is critical to DR stability. Both are critical and should not be conflated in a cloud environment. Recent IDC studies reveal that organizations may include a redundancy strategy in their cloud architecture while postponing the recovery strategy, thus creating risk for the organization. This is especially concerning when considering the risk of exposure to ransomware attacks. Digital resilience, data resilience, and data security are all critical components of a hybrid cloud architecture. "The concepts of digital resilience, data resilience, and data security are very closely related," says Dr. Ken Knapton, adjunct research advisor for IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP). "Defining clear strategies that combine air-gapped and immutable backups with operational data redundancy is essential in a cloud-first or hybrid cloud DR plan."