Chicago ITW 2017: Sagi Brody, Webair’s CTO is hoping that the recent wannacry ransomware attack brings to light the importance of disaster recovery. After all, disaster recovery is in Webair’s domain. The company has created a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering aimed at helping businesses instantly recover from most any IT related problem. “The difference in our offering is that we allow our customers to recover individual applications, instead of forcing them into an all or nothing approach” said Brody. For today’s enterprises, that is a critical difference, especially since disasters come in all shapes and sizes.
Take for example last week’s wannacry attack, which rapidly spread and held companies for ransom, at least as far as access to their data was concerned. As a windows centric attack, not all infected sites had all applications impacted. “With an all or nothing approach, those impacted would have to roll back all operations to a point before the attack” added Brody. Brody said “with an application centric approach, businesses could focus on restoring line of business apps, while also remediating systems, creating the quickest path to productivity.”
While speed to recovery is an important aspect of recovering from a disaster, there is also another critical element, one that can be summed up as “at what point did my data go bad?”
For some disaster recovery solutions, backups only occur daily, happening overnight, meaning that when there is some type of failure, the data is only as good as the last backup – potentially hours of productivity could be lost, especially in a transaction sensitive environment.
Very few businesses could afford to lose a day’s worth of sales transactions, or other activity, without productivity being impacted. Brody said “Our technology closes that backup window to something that can be thought of in seconds. With wannacry, some businesses wound up losing hours or days of work, simply because that could not restore data from right before the attack manifested.”
Brody added “our solution makes it possible to recover applications right up to when a problem has manifested, potentially saving hundreds of hours of work.”
For many enterprises, the idea of having application awareness as part of a DR solution should be a critical consideration, especially as the potential for disruption increases and unexpected problems begin to manifest. Simply put, it all comes down to management, the ability manage operations effectively when they work, and more importantly when they don’t.
