Today’s information-driven organizations depend on the 24/7 availability of their IT infrastructures. Not only are downtime costs enormous, but data integrity is threatened by an ever-growing array of hazards, including power outages, natural disasters, equipment failure, and user error. Additionally, as data centers become more software-defined, they are increasingly vulnerable to software problems and cybersecurity-related catastrophes.

While virtualization of the data center has proven to be revolutionary for IT professionals—providing increased reliability, flexibility, and control, among other benefits—in order to fully realize these advantages, DR processes must also be optimized. This can create some unique challenges as IT professionals must focus their virtualization disaster recovery strategy around backing up and recovering virtual machines (VMs) as opposed to physical servers.