Today’s datacentre infrastructures are complex fabrics of interconnected applications, platforms, and storage arrays. Given the dynamic and interdependent nature of these systems, many large enterprises know just how resilient their datacentres will be in the event of a disaster or an outage.

Periodic disaster recovery and business continuity testing is not enough to detect potential points of failure, since production configuration changes occur nearly every day in these environments. What’s more, the amount of data that needs to be replicated at recovery sites is growing at a rapid rate.

Large companies are spending millions of rands on high-availability solutions and disaster recovery, yet cannot be sure that they will be able to keep running or recover their information quickly if disaster strikes, says Malcolm Clark, director at Recovery Assurance. Many companies have gaps in their strategies and infrastructure that will only become apparent in a real-world crisis.