How to Start Your Digital Transformation Journey with DRaaS

2020has been a year unlike we've ever seen before. The pandemic has forcedorganizations to either rethink or in many cases formulate their businessdecisions that contribute towards disaster planning and maintain businesscontinuity during a crisis.

Digitaltransformation has been at the forefront for many customers' strategicinitiatives. An important part for our customers' journeys towards the digitalenterprise is moving traditional on-premises solutions towards a hybrid cloud model,to help resolve common problems such as:

• Underutilized servers
• High CAPEX for hardware
• Poor availability
• Not enough data centre/facilities space

and satisfy important business outcomes. Theseinclude:

• A reduction to CAPEX
• Reduced data centre footprint
• Increased agility
• High availability
• Reduced risk
• Increased automation
• Increased stability

Animportant piece in the journey is for businesses to ensure high availability oftheir operations in the event of unplanned downtime such as a system failure,security breach, human error or natural disaster. While no organization aimsfor any of these to happen, it is critical to prepare for the possibility toensure that if one does occur you have a plan in place to guide your recovery.

Why it makes sense to make DRaaS thefirst step towards digital transformation

Inmany cases customers are looking to start their digital transformation journeywith disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). It's an easy first step inaddressing the common issues around availability and CAPEX. Nobody wants tocontinue purchasing 2X of everything and paying expensive data centre costs atmultiple locations. Store your DR data in the cloud, recover it in the cloud,pay for the systems you need and not the just in case duplicate array sittinghours away. The economies here make sense.

Disasterrecovery is one of the things most companies struggle with the most. It's likecar insurance. None of us really wants to pay for something that we're not surewe're ever going to need. But, when something unexpectedly happens to that car,we're very happy we're covered.

Thebiggest challenges around disaster recovery planning include:

• Do you have a DR plan?
• Do you regularly test this DR plan? (It's amazing how many plans sit in a dusty binder.)
• Is the plan automated? We're not talking about Skynet level automation. I mean, if a disaster strikes, could you easily and quickly kick off an automated recovery plan?

Thisis where DRaaS makes total sense. It helps customers address the commonpitfalls around availability and continuity, while satisfying the business outcomescommonly coupled with digital transformation.

How CDW can help you implement DRaaS

AtCDW Canada, we've partnered with VMware to help our customers along their digitaltransformation journey.

VMwarehas partnered with Amazon AWS to create a software defined data centre in the publiccloud, called VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware'senterprise class software-defined data centre software to the AWS Cloud, andenables customers to run production applications across VMware vSphere-basedprivate, public and hybrid cloud environments, with optimized access to AWSservices.

Today, VMware Cloud on AWS has a great DRaaS offering. The solution hastaken the DR orchestration/automation powers of VMware Site Recovery Manager(SRM) which includes capabilities like pre-configured runbooks with prioritytiers and inter-VM dependencies, pre-defined resource and network mappings,non-disruptive test workflows, guest-level custom recovery scripts, automatedIP customization and detailed DR reports and combined them with theelasticity and operational simplicity of the cloud in a way that is easy forvSphere customers to adopt.

We have senior consultants who work with organizations to ensurebusiness continuity in the event of a crisis. Leveraging the VMware Cloud onAWS DRaaS offerings will help our customers start their journeys to the cloud.You will be able to utilize familiar vSphere solutions like SRM while removingbarriers impacting important business outcomes to accelerate your company'sDRaaS planning.

If you have any questions about your organization's digital transformation journey or its disaster preparation posture, don't hesitate to reach out to us at 800.972.3922 or visit cdw.ca/solutions to learn more.