Disaster Recovery Journal Fall 2025

Beyond cloud and hypervisors, the backup software should provide a viable roadmap for supporting other platforms. That roadmap may include supporting other clouds and hypervisors, The roadmap may even include migrating VMs to serverless environments. Multiple backup software deployment options In today’s IT environments, organizations need flexibility in how they deploy their backup software. This need stems from how quickly their IT infrastructure can change. Organizations often cannot predict exactly which deployment options they will need over time. Organizations may utilize many or all deployment options the backup software offers. These dynamics often dictate the backup software supports multiple deployment options. These options may include deploy ing the backup software as: n A physical or virtual appliance. n A SaaS offering. n Managed service. n Software for deployment in the cloud, on-premises, or both. Centralized, cloud-based management console Backup software with multiple deployment options may give organizations much needed flexibility. However, multiple deploy ment options can also result in these different instances becoming too complex to manage and secure. If an organization must log into each software instance, the difficulty of managing, maintain ing, and securing them quickly escalates. A central, cloud-based management console hosted by the provider can overcome this potential challenge. To be effective, the console must access and manage all instances of the backup software deployment. In this role, the central console may manage data placement as well as security across the various deployment types. In this case, it may even coordinate the backup of VMs across different platforms and then recover VMs to other platforms at different locations. Flexible, Resilient, Scalable Architecture Backup software that offers multiple deployment options rep resents only one type of flexibility. The IT infrastructure of orga nizations with hybrid hypervisors and clouds changes constantly. Organizations may experience organic growth in one location or expand into new locations. They may contract or close other loca tions. They may only need some locations temporarily. To accommodate these different requirements, the backup soft ware must inherently provide a flexible, resilient, scalable under lying architecture. In addition to supporting multiple deployment options, this backup software’s architecture should facilitate scal ing up or down as needed.

In this way, should organizations encounter performance spikes, unexpected growth, or unforeseen contraction, the backup software can handle these events. Cost-effective Organizations historically only acquired a data mobility solu tion when they have a specified, quantifiable need for it. Even then, they typically first checked the capabilities of other in-house software they already owned before they bought anything new. To date, data mobility software has not represented software organizations buy and keep around “just in case” they need it. However, as more organizations adopt multiple hypervisors and clouds, the need for data mobility switches from “nice-to have” to “must-have.” Selecting backup software that offers data mobility functionality checks the all-important affordability box. Organizations often already have budget for backup and recovery. By acquiring backup software with data mobility facili tates faster adoption and utilization of this functionality across the organization. Data Mobility Emerging as a Must-have Backup Software Feature Organizations today find themselves dealing with multiple pain points – often simultaneously – across their IT environment. Be it server virtualization lock-in, cloud lock-in, or hybrid multi cloud environments, responding to any one of these can feel over whelming. A backup software solution that offers data mobility function ality changes how organizations can respond to these challenges. At a minimum, it addresses these pain points nearly every orga nization now faces. But just as important, it helps unlock the latent value IT envi ronments with multiple hypervisors and clouds offer. By obtain ing backup software with robust data mobility functionality, organizations now get the best of both worlds. Backup software already possesses the core functionality organizations expect and need data protection software to deliver. Most offer multiple deployment options, protection for multiple clouds and hypervisors, and centralized cloud management con soles. By selecting backup software that offers data mobility, organi zations can do more than recover VMs anywhere. They have the freedom to move them to the hypervisor or cloud platform that best meets the organization’s business needs. v Jerome Wendt, an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, is the president and founder of DCIG, LLC., a technology analyst firm. DCIG, LLC., focuses on providing competitive intelligence for the enterprise data protection, data storage, disaster recovery, and cloud technology markets.

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