Disaster Recovery
How Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Changed the Disaster Recovery Playbook
Disaster recovery used to be a simple idea: keep a second copy of your systems in another location, and if something breaks, fail over. For years the market sold that idea as a single vendor package. You bought the replication software, you built or leased the secondary site, and you tested once a year. That was it.
Cloud and hybrid cloud changed everything. Today the question is not just Where is your backup? It is Which mix of environments, vendors, and recovery speeds makes sense for this workload? The options have multiplied. The stakes have not gone down. And the right answer is no longer one-size-fits-all.
The old playbook: replication first, questions later
In the traditional model, DR was mostly a hardware and software decision. You picked a replication tool, matched it to your primary platform, and aimed for the shortest RTO your budget allowed. The same vendor often sold both sides of the equation, which made procurement clean but not always optimal.
It worked when environments were predictable. One OS, one hardware family, one data center, one secondary site. The customer knew what they owned, and the vendor knew what they sold. Recovery was a binary question: did the failover work or not?
That world is still out there, but it is shrinking. For IBM i cloud providers, the typical customer environment now spans on-prem Power Systems, a hosted private cloud, and sometimes a hyperscale footprint. The DR strategy has to follow that shape, not ignore it.
How cloud and hybrid cloud rewrote the options menu
Cloud did not just add another place to store data. It changed the economics, the architecture, and the expectations. A secondary site used to mean a full duplicate environment sitting idle. Cloud made it possible to spin up recovery capacity only when needed, pay for it as operational expense, and locate it almost anywhere.
Hybrid cloud pushed things further. Customers kept production where it made sense — often on IBM Power — while using cloud resources for tiered recovery, archive, or burst capacity. That created a new DR conversation: which workloads stay on Power, which can recover to a cloud target, and which need a mixed path?
The marketplace responded. IBM, Maxava, Precisely, Rocket, Fortra, and a long list of ISVs now offer cloud-aware DR and high availability. Some specialize in IBM i replication. Others focus on cross-platform recovery. Others wrap services around the technology. The good news is that there is a real option for almost every footprint. The hard news is that choosing one requires more homework than it used to.
What changed in the marketplace
Three shifts stand out for anyone quoting IBM i DR today.
- Recovery is now expected to be faster and cheaper. Cloud spoiled customers. The idea that a DR test takes a weekend and a room full of people feels outdated. Buyers want near-zero downtime or at least a clearly defined, short RTO — without paying for a permanent second environment.
- Licensing got complicated. Cloud and MSP usage changed how many DR products are priced. Capacity, partition count, managed-service clauses, and bundled maintenance all affect the real cost. A quote that looks simple on the first page can become expensive after year one.
- Vendor specialization is deeper. One vendor may be excellent at IBM i replication but weak on cross-platform orchestration. Another may have strong cloud tooling but limited Power integration. The best DR strategy often mixes providers rather than standardizing on one.
Why one-size-fits-all does not work
A vendor package that promises to solve everything is appealing. It is also where most DR mistakes start. The customer's environment is never identical to the vendor's reference architecture. Maybe their IBM i partition is bigger, or smaller, or tied to a legacy Infor application. Maybe their network topology makes cloud failover impractical. Maybe their compliance rules require data to stay in a specific region.
When you buy the package before you map the environment, you end up paying for capabilities you do not need and missing the ones you do. The DR plan looks good on paper. It fails in a real test. Then the real work begins — usually under pressure, with a customer watching.
A simple framework for choosing the right DR strategy
If there is no universal answer, there is at least a universal way to find the answer. Start with the environment, not the vendor.
- Define the recovery profile. What is the actual RTO and RPO? Which applications are revenue-critical? Which ones can wait a day? Recovery speed should be tied to business impact, not a vendor default.
- Map the footprint. Where does production live today? On-prem Power, private cloud, public cloud, or a hybrid mix? Where can the data legally and practically go? The architecture dictates the viable targets.
- List the vendors already in the stack. DR is easier when it integrates with your existing IBM i, security, ERP, and management layers. If the customer already runs tools from Rocket, Infor, Broadcom, or Fortra, the DR layer should be chosen with that in mind.
- Compare real options. Get competitive quotes from multiple DR and high-availability vendors. Look at total cost, licensing model, cloud compatibility, and services. The cheapest first-year quote is rarely the best three-year choice.
- Test before you trust. A DR strategy is only as good as the last successful recovery test. If a vendor cannot show you a clean failover in an environment like yours, that is a signal.
The bottom line
“The best DR strategy today is not the one with the most features or the biggest vendor name. It is the one that fits your specific mix of cloud, on-prem, workloads, and recovery promises.”
That is the shift the market is still absorbing. Cloud and hybrid cloud gave IBM i teams more choices than ever. But more choice means more complexity. The winners will be the providers who stop asking Which vendor should we use? and start asking Which combination of environments and vendors actually protects this customer?
We built our quote desk to make that second question easier to answer. By pulling independent quotes from across the IBM i ecosystem — IBM, Precisely, Rocket, Infor, Broadcom, Fortra, Maxava, Fresche, ARCAD, and others — we give cloud providers the options they need to design a DR strategy that fits, not a package that merely sounds good.