By Bjorn Biel Beltran
Seeking to democratize business continuity solutions in the Philippines, Converge ICT has introduced its Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), in collaboration with Zerto, a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
The strategic partnership aims to bolster the Philippines’ efforts towards data security, protecting businesses from disruptions borne from natural disasters and human error, and providing a robust shield against potential cyberattacks.
“Today when you talk of disaster, it comes in many forms. Physical, virtual, it could be something local or even something global,” Jesus C. Romero, Senior Executive Vice-President & Chief Operations Officer of Converge ICT Solutions, Inc., said in a presentation. “You’ve heard of many companies getting their data compromised. Sometimes, the data is actually taken away from them. That’s something that we are very conscious of, because it doesn’t matter if you have a disaster recovery site when all of your data has been taken away.”
Unlike traditional backup solutions that only focus on data recovery, DRaaS uses Zerto’s cutting-edge Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology to offer a holistic approach to safeguard businesses against a variety of disruptions, including natural disasters, power outages, and cyber-attacks.
Key features of Converge ICT DRaaS include always-on replication, near-synchronous replication ensuring thousands of recovery points, delivering the lowest Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). There are also journal-based recovery logs that records every change into a journal with second-level granularity, allowing swift recovery to just before an incident.
Meanwhile, application-centric recovery protects multi-VM applications as a single unit for consistent and straightforward recovery.
“With an effective disaster recovery or DR plan and solution in place, your organization becomes resilient and able to easily resume operations with minimal downtime and data loss,” Jessica Powell-Bragas, Channels, Partner Ecosystem & Commercial Sales country leader, HPE, said.
“With Converge ICT and HPE Disaster Recovery as a Service or DRaaS, an organization can back up its data and infrastructure to a third-party cloud computing environment that restores access and functionality after a disaster. You simultaneously gain the power of simplicity. And the freedom of flexibility, all while dramatically limiting your risk of data loss and downtime.”
As more businesses expand their operations online, the more critical data security becomes. For instance, the Philippines has seen a dramatic surge in ransomware attacks, with incidents doubling in 2023. A single disruption from cyberattacks can have a direct impact to many businesses, from loss of revenues, productivity, and compliance issues, as well as indirect consequences like brand damage, customer loss, and reputational harm.
Jesus C. Romero, Converge ICT Solutions, Inc. Senior Executive Vice-President & Chief Operations Officer — Photo by Manuel Sagun Jr.
Most large corporations have the necessary contingencies to prevent such incidents, but Mr. Romero noted that many medium-sized enterprises don’t have the ability for various reasons. DRaaS seeks to solve this.
“I think money is always a reason. Remember, you have to set it up. You have to buy servers, storage, software, the application, or subscribe to a service. But today the available services are mainly outside of the country, so there is additional cost,” he said.
“Instead of doing that, if you can subscribe on a monthly basis only for what you need, then there’s no upfront cost. There are no maintenance costs, just one monthly bill. And then you don’t even need to have the expertise. The expertise is provided by our ecosystem.”
Converge ICT’s DRaaS offers three service models to cater to varying levels of customer involvement: Self-Service DRaaS, where customers manage the setup and ongoing maintenance, while Converge ICT provides the infrastructure and tools; Assisted or Partially Managed DRaaS, where management responsibilities are shared between the customer and Converge ICT; and Fully Managed DRaaS, where Converge ICT handles the entire disaster recovery solution, offering complete peace of mind.
The ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model, Converge ICT noted, ensures that the solutions are scalable for businesses of any size and can evolve with your business needs. The service maintains data privacy and sovereignty, ensuring that data remains within the country, complying with local regulations. There is no need for hardware or software maintenance, eliminating the management of physical infrastructure, and there are no egress charges, avoiding costly international private lines and unexpected expenses.
In addition to DRaaS, Converge ICT offers a private infrastructure service known as Converge Lake. This includes Compute Lake, providing enterprise-grade compute resources with a flexible subscription model, offering secure, private, and reliable virtual instances or physical machines. Storage Lake offers secure, private storage infrastructure supporting object, block, and file storages, tailored to enterprise workloads with flexible subscription options.
With the launch of DRaaS, Converge ICT and HPE Zerto aims to bring a world-class business continuity solutions to the Philippines, removing much of the complexity that is needed for them to secure their data.
“Before, you cannot even think of doing this. It’s too expensive. It’s too complex and you don’t have the right people. So you have to live with a situation where, any day now, you can be attacked and can lose your data. You’ll be down for one day, two days, three days, a month. Who knows?” Mr. Romero said, adding that they hope to educate more businesses about the value of data security solutions like DRaaS, particularly those that have not had the opportunity to avail of such services due to its prior cost.
“There’s a lot of them. They’re the ones who are getting left behind,” he said.
