Assurestor Blog
This guide details building a hybrid IT disaster recovery plan by mapping system dependencies, prioritizing critical systems, assigning clear ownership, setting RTO/RPO targets, and enforcing regular testing for effective recovery.
True hybrid IT resilience demands comprehensive, layered protection across on-premise, cloud, and SaaS platforms, combining multi-vendor backups, automation, encryption, and MSP partnerships for seamless recovery and minimal downtime.
Operational assurance in hybrid IT ensures resilient data protection and recovery across on-premise, cloud, and SaaS through integrated technology, processes, multi-vendor strategies, and partner-driven delivery.
Choose a cloud backup strategy for hybrid IT by balancing on-premise and cloud recovery, prioritizing business continuity, assessing workload coverage, RTO/RPO, integration, and leveraging channel solutions and MSPs for robust data protection.
Over the past few years, something fundamental has shifted in the infrastructure and data resilience market.
Vendor lock-in has moved from being a theoretical risk buried in strategy documents to something that is actively shaping real-world decisions. MSPs, resellers and end-user organisations are no longer just aware of it, they are designing around it.
This change has not happened by accident. It has been driven by a combination of market consolidation, evolving vendor strategies and a growing recognition that flexibility is now critical to long-term success.
The question is no longer whether vendor lock-in is a risk.
The question is what you are doing about it.
For many in the channel, the turning point was the transformation of VMware following its acquisition by Broadcom.
In a short space of time, we have seen fundamental changes:
These changes have had a ripple effect across the market.
Partners that had built entire service offerings around a single platform suddenly found themselves exposed. End customers began asking more challenging questions about portability, cost control and long-term risk.
And, importantly, confidence in single-vendor strategies started to erode.
This is not a criticism of any one vendor. It is a reflection of a broader industry shift.
We are seeing similar consolidation and tighter ecosystem alignment across major players, including HPE, Zerto and Veeam. These moves create powerful platforms, but they also reinforce a clear message.
Vendors want deeper commitment.
Customers want more choice.
In conversations with partners today, there is a clear and consistent shift in mindset.
Organisations are moving:
The reason is simple.
Vendor lock-in is not just a technical issue. It is a commercial and operational constraint.
It impacts:
We are now seeing multi-platform and hybrid strategies become the norm, not the exception. Organisations want the ability to select the right platform for the right workload and retain the freedom to change when needed.
Flexibility is no longer a nice-to-have.
It is becoming a baseline expectation.
There was a time when building around a single vendor made sense.
It simplified operations. It aligned skills. It reduced integration effort.
But that model depends on one assumption: Stability.
When vendor programmes, pricing, or product direction change, a single-stack strategy becomes a single point of failure.
Today, no vendor can realistically be the best across every aspect of data resilience.
Backup, disaster recovery, SaaS protection, cyber resilience, archive and workload mobility. Each of these areas evolves at a different pace and different platforms lead in different categories.
Trying to force every use case onto one platform inevitably leads to compromise.
At Assurestor, we made a conscious decision not to build around a single vendor.
Instead, we built a multi-vendor data resilience ecosystem, underpinned by six strategic technology stacks.
This is not about offering more choice for the sake of it.
It is about giving our partners the ability to deliver the right outcome for every customer, without being constrained by the limitations of a single platform.
Crucially, we combine this with a single specialist Cloud Service Provider model.
That means:
But behind it sits a portfolio of technologies that can be blended to meet specific requirements.
This approach delivers practical, tangible benefits for MSPs and resellers.
Partners can design solutions around customer needs, rather than forcing customers into a predefined stack.
If one platform changes, your entire proposition is not at risk.
Flexibility creates negotiating power and allows partners to stay competitive.
By combining technologies, partners can deliver end-to-end protection across hybrid, cloud and SaaS environments.
This is not about complexity.
It is about control.
Multi-vendor strategies can introduce operational overhead if not managed correctly.
That is where the role of a specialist CSP becomes critical.
At Assurestor, we remove that complexity by acting as a single point of engagement, while providing access to multiple enterprise-grade platforms.
The result is simple.
Choice without fragmentation.
Flexibility without operational burden.
Confidence without compromise.
The direction of travel in the market is clear.
Customers are becoming more informed.
They are asking more questions.
They are thinking longer term.
And they are placing increasing value on partners who can offer independence, not just expertise.
The next wave of disruption in our industry is not a question of if. It is when.
The partners who are prepared for that change will be the ones who have already designed it into their strategy.
Vendor lock-in is no longer a theoretical risk.
It is a present-day factor influencing how platforms are selected, how services are delivered and how customer relationships are maintained.
The most successful MSPs and resellers over the next five years will not be defined by the vendor they chose.
They will be defined by the flexibility they built into their business.
Assurestor is enabling a new generation of channel partners to deliver data resilience without constraint.
If you want to explore how a multi-vendor approach can strengthen your offering and give you greater control, we are ready to help.
Speak to the Assurestor team to see how our six-platform ecosystem can support your next customer opportunity.
Protecting Microsoft Entra ID is vital for hybrid IT resilience, ensuring secure identity access alongside data backups to enable fast recovery, maintain business continuity, and prevent disruption.
For years, backup has been treated as a necessary safety net. Something you hope you never need, designed purely for recovery after something has gone wrong.
That view no longer holds up.
Modern organisations run on SaaS platforms, APIs and, increasingly, AI agents. Data changes constantly, permissions shift daily, and automated systems now touch sensitive information at machine speed. The challenge is no longer just recovering data. It is understanding what you have, what changed, who accessed it, and whether that change introduced risk.
This is where HYCU aiR comes in.
HYCU aiR, short for AI Resilience, is a new capability within the HYCU R‑Cloud platform that turns backup data into a live intelligence layer.
It does not replace the backup. It does not change how recovery works. Instead, aiR reads what HYCU has already been backing up and makes that information searchable, analysable, and operationally useful.
Every backup is a time‑stamped record of how your organisation actually works. Files, permissions, configuration changes, identity updates and activity across SaaS, cloud, and on‑prem platforms are all captured during backup. Historically, that intelligence has gone unused.
aiR is designed to read it.
HYCU aiR uses existing backup snapshots as its only data source. There are no new endpoint agents to deploy, no separate data lake to build, and no additional SaaS APIs to manage.
Security, compliance, and IT teams can ask plain‑English questions across all protected workloads at once, such as:
aiR runs purpose‑built AI agents across the backup data to answer these questions, using the backups as a single, consistent record of truth.
This approach reframes backup from passive insurance into an active intelligence asset.
Most organisations already own fragments of the tooling needed for visibility across their environments. Data security posture tools show where sensitive data lives. Identity tools track access drift. Insider risk platforms flag suspicious behaviour. AI governance tools attempt to monitor automated activity.
Each tool has value, but together they are expensive, complex, and difficult to operate, particularly for mid‑market organisations.
aiR targets this gap directly by using backup data to surface insight that would otherwise require multiple standalone products.
Key use cases include:
All of this insight comes from data the organisation is already paying to protect.
It is important to be clear about boundaries.
HYCU aiR is not anti‑virus, EDR, MDR, or malware scanning. It does not stop ransomware at runtime, and it does not replace security controls designed to block attacks.
Its role is intelligence, not prevention.
HYCU describes this distinction simply: aiR delivers intelligence, R‑Cloud delivers recovery. Together, they form resilience.
SaaS sprawl, remote working, and AI‑driven automation have changed how data lives and moves inside organisations. Traditional security tooling struggles to maintain visibility at this scale, while backup remains one of the few systems that consistently captures everything.
HYCU aiR recognises that reality and treats backup as what it actually is: the most complete historical record of your data estate.
By making that record searchable and understandable, aiR helps organisations answer questions they know they should be asking, but often cannot afford or operationalise using point solutions alone.
Backup has always been about recovery. HYCU aiR extends that value by adding understanding.
Not as another console, not as another agent, but by unlocking intelligence that already exists inside your backups.
In an environment where change is constant and AI activity is accelerating, resilience is no longer just about restoring data. It is about knowing what changed, what it affected, and being ready to respond with confidence.
Insurance pays out when things go wrong.
Intelligence stops you being surprised when they do.
Your backups have always been both. HYCU aiR just makes the second part visible.
Data protection teams are under constant pressure. In complex environments, the information they need is rarely in one place — system status and alerts live in one tool, documentation and fixes in another, and recovery data somewhere else entirely. That fragmentation costs time, and in a recovery scenario, time is everything.
HPE Zerto’s new AI assistant, introduced in Zerto U9, is designed to close that gap.
Note. Zerto U9 is available now…
The HPE Zerto AI assistant brings together three critical sources of knowledge in a single, unified experience:
Instead of switching between dashboards, knowledge bases, and ticketing systems, teams get contextual answers surfaced directly inside their workflow — grounded in what’s actually happening in their environment right now.
Rather than interpreting raw alerts and status codes, teams can ask the assistant plain-language questions and get clear, actionable answers about current data protection health — including what’s at risk and why.
When an issue arises, understanding its blast radius matters. The AI assistant helps teams quickly assess the potential impact to SLAs, so they can prioritise their response and communicate clearly with stakeholders — without needing to manually correlate data across multiple systems.
The assistant doesn’t just flag problems — it links known issues to recommended resolutions, guiding teams through the right next steps without requiring them to hunt through documentation or escalate prematurely.
Beyond troubleshooting, the assistant supports more flexible reporting through nuanced, natural-language summaries — making it easier to communicate recovery readiness to leadership or compliance teams.
The headline benefit of the HPE Zerto AI assistant is simple: it turns signals into decisions. Faster troubleshooting, clearer SLA and risk visibility, and greater confidence in recovery readiness — all without leaving the tools your team already works in.
In an industry where recovery time objectives are measured in minutes, removing the friction between “something is wrong” and “here’s what to do about it” isn’t just a quality-of-life improvement. It’s a competitive advantage.
Identity has always played a central role in IT environments. From Active Directory through to modern identity providers, access control has long been a core part of how organisations manage systems and users.
What has changed is not the existence of identity. It is the role it now plays and the level of risk attached to it.
Across all IT environments, identity sits at the centre of access. Users connect to SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, cloud and on-premises infrastructure, and business-critical applications, all through identity.
That means identity is no longer just a layer within the architecture. It is the control point for it.
If identity is compromised, attackers do not need to bypass infrastructure controls. They can simply log in. And when they do, they do not just gain access to live systems. They gain access to the tools and data organisations rely on to recover. Backup infrastructure, recovery points, response capabilities. All of it becomes a target.
That is why immutability and covert protection, core capabilities within Assurestor’s NG platform, are so important. Ensuring backup data cannot be altered or deleted, regardless of who has access, removes one of the most critical leverage points an attacker can exploit.
For a long time, protection strategies focused on infrastructure. Servers, storage, networks. That made sense because that is where the risk lived.
But environments have changed, and so has the way attacks happen. Today, most successful attacks do not break through walls. They walk through the door using stolen or compromised credentials. They target identity platforms directly. They escalate privileges quietly, moving through systems without triggering the alerts that traditional infrastructure controls were built to catch.
This changes what organisations need to think about. It is no longer just about keeping attackers out. It is about what happens when someone is already inside, using access that looks completely legitimate.
Identity resilience is the ability to back up, recover and restore identity configurations, access policies and user data quickly after a breach or outage. Yet one of the most common conversations we have with organisations is around a belief that because identity sits within a major SaaS platform, it is automatically protected. It is an understandable assumption, but it is one that leaves a lot of organisations exposed.
According to Gartner’s 2024 IAM Leadership Survey, 54% of organisations have seen an increase in identity-related breaches, with one in three experiencing business interruptions, financial loss or regulatory penalties as a result. The gap between assumption and reality is not just a security problem. It is a business risk.
Most identity platforms are built to handle authentication, availability and access management. What they are not built to do is provide independent backup of identity data, recovery of configurations, rollback of changes, or protection against actions that are accidental or deliberate.
That creates a gap. Not in access control, but in recoverability. An identity platform being available is not the same as it being recoverable. Configurations, policies, roles and access rights can be changed, corrupted or deleted. Without independent protection, restoring them to a known good state is not straightforward. In a real incident, that gap can significantly extend recovery time and the overall impact on the business.
“Assurestor’s latest Next Generation (NG) platforms include broad support to protect the key identity providers used by modern organisations, including Microsoft Entra ID, Okta Identity Cloud and AWS IAM.”
Jason Reid, Managing Director, Assurestor
Identity has traditionally sat within the security function. But in practice, it now touches far more than that.
When identity is compromised, the consequences spread quickly. Access to SaaS platforms can be disrupted, data can be altered or deleted, and privileges can be escalated across multiple systems. In serious cases, entire environments can be affected before the incident is even detected.
At that point, the challenge is not prevention. It is recovery. And recovery requires more than good security tooling. It requires the ability to restore identity to a known good state, quickly and with precision. That is why identity now sits at the intersection of security, data protection and disaster recovery, and why organisations that treat it as a resilience issue are in a much stronger position when something goes wrong.
“Identity is no longer just a security concern, it is a business resilience one. Organisations that protect and recover their identity systems with the same rigor as their critical data are the ones that stay operational when things go wrong.”
Andy Fernandez, General Manager of AI and Cyber, HYCU
Protecting identity properly means treating it as part of a broader resilience strategy, not a separate workstream. That means ensuring identity data and configurations are protected independently, that recovery is fast and granular, and that identity is included in wider backup and recovery planning alongside SaaS, cloud and infrastructure.
The organisations getting this right are not necessarily the ones with the most tools. They are the ones that have closed the gaps the obvious tools leave behind. Find out how Assurestor’s NG platforms can help close those gaps.
We will be exploring identity risk and modern data protection in more detail in our upcoming session with HYCU.
Webinar: Identity and Modern Data Protection
7th May – 3.00 pm
We will be covering how identity risk is evolving, where traditional approaches fall short, and what organisations and partners should be thinking about next.
Identity is not a new concept. But the role it plays, and the impact it can have when things go wrong, has changed significantly.
Protecting it properly is no longer optional. It is part of protecting everything else.
Unstructured data continues to grow rapidly across enterprise storage environments, and NetApp ONTAP platforms are no exception. File shares, application data, and user content all add value to the business, but they also increase the attack surface for malware and ransomware.
As cyber threats become more sophisticated, it is no longer enough to focus solely on protecting production systems. Organisations must also ensure that the data they rely on for recovery is clean, trusted, and free from hidden threats.
That is why we are pleased to announce a new capability within Backup2Cloud NG, powered by HYCU HCE, that enhances cyber resilience for NetApp ONTAP environments.
Malware scanning for ONTAP file data, without disruption
Backup2Cloud NG now supports malware scanning for NetApp ONTAP file data using YARA rules, enabling organisations to detect hidden threats without impacting production systems or backup operations.
This approach allows security and infrastructure teams to gain deeper visibility into their data while maintaining the performance and availability their users expect.
Unlike traditional antivirus tools that rely on scanning data as it is accessed, this capability operates out of band, meaning it does not interfere with live workloads or introduce delays during backup windows.
Why unstructured data is a growing risk
Unstructured file data often contains information that is infrequently accessed but highly valuable, such as historical records, shared documents, and application outputs. These files can remain unchanged for long periods, making them an ideal place for malware to persist unnoticed.
In many cases, organisations only discover infected files during a recovery event, when time pressure is highest and options are limited. Restoring compromised data can reintroduce malware into the environment, undermining recovery efforts and increasing business risk.
By proactively scanning file data for known indicators of compromise, organisations can identify and address threats earlier, before they have the chance to spread or resurface during a restore.
What YARA‑based scanning delivers
YARA rules are widely used by security teams to identify malware based on known patterns and behaviours within files. Rather than relying solely on file metadata or access activity, YARA examines file contents to detect malicious indicators that may otherwise go unnoticed.
With Backup2Cloud NG, this capability is applied directly to NetApp ONTAP file data in a way that is operationally safe and efficient. There is no requirement to pause production systems, no impact on user access, and no disruption to backup schedules.
Key benefits for ONTAP environments
This enhancement enables organisations to:
✔ Scan ONTAP file data for hidden malware without touching production systems
✔ Maintain normal backup performance and operational processes
✔ Detect threats earlier in the attack lifecycle
✔ Reduce the risk of restoring infected data after an incident
✔ Improve confidence in recovery outcomes
The result is a more resilient data protection strategy that focuses not just on recoverability, but on recovering clean, trusted data.
A practical step forward in cyber resilience
Cyber resilience is not achieved through a single tool or technology. It requires a layered approach that combines reliable backups, secure storage, and intelligent threat detection.
By extending malware scanning into NetApp ONTAP file data, Backup2Cloud NG helps bridge the gap between backup and security, giving organisations greater assurance that their recovery data can be trusted when it matters most.
If you would like to learn more about how Backup2Cloud NG can strengthen cyber resilience across your NetApp environment, please get in touch with the Assurestor team.
