Using Alkira Cloud Area Networking to Power Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery Strategies

Disaster Recovery is something every business requires, but remains a difficult objective to fully achieve. As more and more critical applications move to the cloud, avoiding major public cloud outages and other unforeseen events becomes serious challenges in providing business continuity to customers, internal end-users, and partners. Plans can be made, but to have Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies in place that actually work when you need them to, a new approach is needed.

The most critical element of DR lies in connectivity. Backup resources, distributed workloads, and secondary infrastructure ultimately all remain unusable if end-users can’t reach it via the network.

The legacy networking model doesn’t offer a lot of great options for keeping pace with today’s rapidly-changing IT environments, most of which involve multiple clouds, globally dispersed remote users, virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI), and software-defined edge resources. The manual processes involved with managing all the disparate pieces of the legacy network are time consuming, inflexible, and expensive. So, what’s the alternative?

Put flexible and agile networking at the center of your DR strategy

Alkira delivers Cloud Area Networking via a unique platform that is ideal for helping to support real Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning for the cloud era. With Alkira, all network resources are visible, scalable, and secure, giving you the tools you need to make a real Disaster Recovery plan that actually works in today’s complex multi-cloud world.

With Alkira, IT leaders gain an invaluable and revolutionary advantage in managing the next generation of networking for their organization, one built in the cloud, for the cloud. There’s no hardware to buy, software to install, or licenses to manage. Alkira delivers networking entirely as a service, with the flexibility to add, remove, and change the network to meet the dynamic needs of your business.

Alkira delivers new tools for creating and executing modernized disaster recovery

Many DR plans exist as little more than static designs in a binder on the shelf, perhaps as a past project or old quarterly objective. When the unexpected happens, many businesses go through the painful process of discovering that the DR plans in place simply do not work as originally envisioned. Here are some important drivers and considerations for deploying a truly responsive DR strategy:

• Rapidly adopt a multi-cloud footprint for redundancy and protection. Alkira enables you to take on the multi-cloud era without obstacles. The Alkira platform is powered by a simple and easy to use interface that enables you to seamlessly scale networking infrastructure from one cloud to many. With this speed and agility provided by Alkira’s revolutionary approach to cloud networking, you can employ a multi-cloud strategy that bolsters DR planning and gives you the resources you need to boost resilience and ensure business continuity.
• Protect mission-critical applications and services. The chief objective of any enterprise-class DR plan is to safeguard the applications and digital resources that power the business and keep them operational. The costs of losing these applications, even temporarily, can be dramatic and disruptive. Alkira can help you simplify the process of identifying and classifying top priority resources, and scale networking requirements in real time. From the edge to the cloud, Alkira forms your centralized cloud network backbone and cuts through network complexity, saving you time and energy. In the time of a real emergency, having networking modernized and working to help the organization is a game changing transformation, and let’s IT focus on the most important elements of DR rather than worrying about infrastructure plumbing.
• Centralize management and visibility to accelerate DR. With the unmatched visibility and control of the entire networking and cloud infrastructure, Alkira empowers you with clear insight into connectivity, security, and policy classifications. With Alkira, you can support all DR networking requirements, from data center re-routing to DCI, all from a centralized single pane of glass platform.
• Avoid major public cloud outages with a few clicks. The major cloud providers deliver excellent services, but no system is perfect and inevitably downtime and outages can happen. Unfortunately, your business can’t afford to have a large regional cloud outage disrupt business. Alkira makes it possible to architect networking solutions for the cloud that mitigate against regional outages and protect the business against costly downtime. Enjoy features such as cloud regional redundancy and protect your mission-critical applications from large scale outages, all with a few clicks within the Alkira platform.
• Meeting SLAs: Another important goal of DR is to ensure that a company meets its obligations to customers, partners, and end users. This is especially important for organizations that back their services with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Failing to meet SLAs is not only damaging to an individual account, but can rapidly damage the reputation of the entire business. Alkira Cloud Area Networking allows you to quickly and effectively manage IT resources in a way that provides the utmost in redundancy and resiliency, delivering agile networking that supports even the most stringent SLA requirements.

Bring DR into the Multi-Cloud Era

The last few years have brought dramatic change to the IT landscape, with an explosion in cloud-native applications, remote end users, and mission-critical digital resources. IT leaders are tasked with managing more than ever, oftentimes with less budget, staff, and time.

Alkira can help accelerate and modernize your organization’s DR strategy and bring it up to par for the needs of today’s new multi-cloud reality. The legacy networking approach of yesterday is not going to cut it, with long provisioning times, rigid capabilities, and linear designs.

At Alkira, we’ve helped customers tackle the challenges presented by enterprise-scale infrastructure, and have played an instrumental role in flipping the switch on Disaster Recovery. Instead of being a clunky and unresponsive process, or a dated plan with limited real-world functionality, now customers are using Alkira to turbocharge DR and modernize it. If you’re seeking new solutions for DR, reach out to our team today and we’ll be happy to demonstrate the power of Alkira for multi-cloud networking.