Deploying Flexible Data Protection to Support Cloud Workload Placement
Digital transformation (DX) projects are designed to help organizations better utilize data for competitive advantage. This advantage can be realized in two forms. First, it is axiomatic to say that organizations with greater data availability will have a relative advantage over organizations that suffer data outages. Companies that cannot process customer transactions may permanently lose both the revenue and the customer. Second, organizations that can leverage data analytics into better customer insights, identify cost savings, or discover superior merchandizing will find market opportunities where others do not.
IDC research over recent years shows that 60% of organizations either have embarked on or have completed a DX project. Based on research conducted by IDC for this paper, sponsored by Dell Technologies, Intel, and VMware, 91% of respondents surveyed consider infrastructure modernization either "very" or "extremely" important to DX success. Furthermore, 70.1% of respondents plan to conduct and deploy a data protection refresh as part of their DX initiative, a rate slightly higher than server refresh (67%) and storage refresh (68.2%), although these similar rates indicate an "all of the above" need for most organizations. The goal of data protection refreshes is to protect the business' ability to operate and, when needed, to recover data faster and more completely — specifically, to achieve service level agreements (SLAs), and improve metrics such as recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO), lowering them to as near to zero as possible. In plain language, a zero RPO and a zero RTO would deliver zero downtime with zero data loss. While this may not be an entirely realistic goal today, technology is continually getting closer and closer to reaching it.
