Every business would do well to follow the Scout Motto when it comes to data’s disaster backup and recovery. Preparedness is essential in a computing environment where it is “when,” not “if,” disaster occurs. But no matter how much money is thrown at data protection, bad guys and bad weather alike can strike without warning.

“It doesn’t matter how great the equipment is if either a bad actor or nature takes it out for you,” said Marc Creviere (pictured, left), principal systems engineer at US Signal Co. LLC. “You’ve got to have both the protection on the front end, the training for the people, and recovery options in the event [an attacker] does get in.”

Creviere and Doc D’Errico (pictured, right), chief marketing officer of Infinidat Ltd., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed data security and protection and how cloud-based disaster recovery technologies can protect against business disruption in the event of attack (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

High stakes keep executives awake at night

In US Signal’s “State of the Web and DDoS Attacks Survey,” three out of four respondents said their biggest concerns were either distributed denial of service or ransomware. Four out of five companies had experienced a recent cyberattack, with an average 12 hours of downtime and cost of $150,000.

These statistics have made focusing on disaster recovery technologies a successful strategy for US Signal. disaster recovery as a service is a simpler solution to data backup and recovery than complex and costly data center duplication, as it offers cloud-based third-party server replication that provides total systems backup in the event of a failure, according to D’Errico.

“If you’re looking for the DRaaS-type capabilities, whether it’s single site or multi-site, going to cloud service providers makes a lot of sense,” D’Errico stated. “Because now, even if it’s on-premises to a cloud service provider, you’re not having to worry about that second set of infrastructure. You’re not having to worry about the management of it. You’re not having to worry about the systems integration of it.”

US Signal’s data protection and recovery solutions rely on Infinidat’s InfiniBox as the primary underlying storage platform. Infinidat’s competitive pricing and responsiveness were key factors for US Signal choosing the Israeli-American data storage solutions company as a primary supplier, according to Creviere.

“The price per terabyte is hard to beat … [and] it ties in extremely well with our infrastructure because we scale so quickly,” he stated.

The decision has played out for the benefit of both companies. “The Infinidat experience, the company experience, the support experience, it is the benchmark by which we judge all other vendors now. It’s that good,” Creviere said.

Multiple solutions for guaranteed availability

US Signal’s DRaaS for VMware based on the vCloud availability platform is the solution “near and dear to my heart,” Creviere said. US Signal is a “big consumer of VMware technologies,” he explained.

DRaaS for VMware uses built-in VMware replication technologies, making it simple to deploy. “There’s not a lot of learning curve, there’s not a lot of extra components,” Creviere stated. “[It’s] super simple to get up and running and get [recovery point objectives] RPOs as low as five minutes. The solution runs on an open switch platform, making it cost effective.

“You’re paying for storage and per VM and that’s it,” Creviere said.

A cloud replication for Veeam is based on the same ecosystem, and a Zerto-based offering allows customers to replicate to either multiple cloud destinations (one being US Signal) or one of their own sites with US Signal as the tertiary location.

“We’ve got a lot of different ways that we can protect that data and bring it in and get a copy in our data center,” Creviere stated. “So, in the event that it becomes unavailable at the source, it’s either managed or customer managed. We can get it up and running in a short time frame on our infrastructure.”

Having a disaster recovery plan is important. But having a good partner is just as critical, according to D’Errico. “If you don’t have a [chief information security officer] who’s got the chops to be dealing with these types of problems, that’s when you need a partner like US Signal to really step in and take you through what’s involved in a realistic plan, something that’s not going to break the bank, something that’s really going to protect your business going forward, because these things are very real.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: Infinidat Ltd. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Infinidat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE