Written by Arkady Rapoport, Regional Service Delivery Manager, TeraSky Europe
Arkady Rapoport
TeraSky helps organizations beat the complexity of new technologies to transform with confidence. They help oversee smooth, safe, and cost-effective projects past deployment and onboarding to closing and deliver technical craftsmanship and operational excellence. Whether it’s an established enterprise or a born-to-the-cloud startup, customers can trust the journey with TeraSky.
With the geopolitical turmoil in Eastern Europe, the Baltic region has been susceptible and has re-evaluated its IT security systems. It has become clear that large organizations must guard against cyber criminals, DDoS, and ransomware attacks and seriously assess the possibility of having their physical data centres affected by natural disasters. It is no longer an extra precautionary step implemented “just because” but a necessity dictated by reality.
Because of investments in education and certification of our engineering team as well as mastering the VMware Cloud on AWS Competency Program, TeraSky Europe now has the VMware Managed Services Provider (MSP) status in the Baltics. We have enhanced our position as the solution leader by deploying VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery for an aviation company.
Furthermore, it is the most suitable solution for enterprise companies with server virtualization implemented with VMware technology, to manage the disaster recovery needs and the most advanced DR solution deployed in the Baltics currently.
Results and Lessons Learned
How fast were we able to get customers’ critical systems operational?
Before the VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery deployment, the organization’s data protection ensured a classical data backup solution without any geo-redundancy (by implementing a single data location) and recovery in case of an incident. Thus, in the event of a disruption to the company’s operations, it could take weeks to restore data and resume operations, not considering the replacement hardware delivery times.
VMware Cloud DR Proof of Concept
The customer managed to achieve a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1-2 hours to recover protected workloads and around 40 minutes to restore critical infrastructure. RTO times can be even less, depending on multiple factors, including network setup, internal DR procedures, and size of the environment.
Greater Flexibility and Choice with 30-minute RPOs
The VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery solution can deliver RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) as low as 30 minutes, which means that in the worst-case scenario, a customer could have data loss for no more than 30 minutes. RPOs can be flexibly adjusted for different workloads based on their criticality.
Easy to Setup
The usual VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery service deployment time after agreements and prerequisites in place is up to 2 business days.
Challenges
Implementation of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery requires some prep work to be done by the customer, including:
- An assessment of all the workloads by classifying them by business criticality level and defining RTOs/ RPOs
- Proper configuration and preparation of on-prem environment
- Preparation for network DR
- Network connection speed and throughput, since it is one of the crucial points which may affect the efficiency of the VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery solution
Opportunities
VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is a relatively new solution for the Baltic region, but one that has performed very well.
VMware also offers a new add-on solution that specifically addresses ransomware recovery through embedded behavioral analysis of powered-on workloads in an Isolated Recovery Environment in the cloud to allow customers to recover in the face of modern ransomware threats confidently and quickly. You can learn more about VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery here and here and about VMware Ransomware Recovery here.
Learn more about TeraSky here.