Blue Coat Systems Technology Brief Sample

The global enterprise has a voracious appetite for data, and little patience for downtime. According to a recent Forrester report, 82 percent of larger IT organizations rated improving recovery time as a “critical” or “very critical” business priority. The need for continued focus and investment is clear, especially when you consider that data-at-rest in enterprises is growing at a compounded rate of 55 percent a year. Moving all that data is a mounting challenge, and business simply cannot wait.

To meet these growing demands at a reasonable cost, organizations are moving to IP-based networks; 70 percent of North American and 79 percent of European organizations use some combination of the Internet, MPLS or Ethernet to connect to their primary backup datacenter. Bandwidth prices may be in decline, but that doesn’t mean it comes cheap. Bandwidth, on average, is 29 percent of the total cost of replication, backup and recovery solutions, and is often constrained by the effects of latency.

End-to-end plans for turning disaster recovery into full business continuity are very complex, but from an IP-network perspective it can be reduced to three main challenges.

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