No company is exempt from the paralyzing consequences of catastrophes. A flexible and robust Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan that comprehensively considers people, processes, and technology systems is more essential than ever before. With the increased importance of IT resources in the business transformation, the dependency on the availability of these resources also increases. Business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) must be an integrated part of any IT infrastructure strategy. To address this challenge, IT organizations must adopt Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions that are integrated into a hybrid cloud operating model, which can be built from the ground up to simplify the implementation of high availability and DR for workloads running in virtual machines (VMs) and containers. This type of approach builds a strong base of resiliency in data centers and improves Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and shrinks Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Besides the simplicity of setup and maintenance, DR in a hybrid HCI infrastructure can provide automatic failover without the need for manual intervention. Using public cloud resources can be a cost-effective way to achieve DR, so it is imperative that HCI can integrate properly with the public cloud.

The best data protection strategies incorporate a combination of different technologies (deduplicated backup, archive, data replication, business continuity, and workload mobility) to deliver the right level of data protection for each business application. The following figure highlights that a reduced dataset holds the most valuable information and is protected with the most advanced technologies available. In contrast, more traditional protection tools can protect the rest of the data.