Enterprises will need to start investing in modernising their datacentres with virtualisation, storage and cloud technologies to meet today`s business needs by enabling five key capabilities: high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified recoverability, leveraged data and complete visibility.
Constant technology evolution disrupts traditional business models and technology setup. To address this, new age digital Enterprise needs to be Always-On for delivering seamless services to meet the ever-changing business demands and drive innovation. The management and evolution of these technologies will be critical in accelerating digital transformation of enterprises, as it is intolerant of legacy IT practices.
According to IAMAI and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report India@Digital, the Indian Internet economy is slated to reach $200 billion by 2020 and contribute 5 per cent of GDP. With this exponential data growth, enterprises will be driven to significantly transform their business to unlock their true potential.
Today’s modern enterprises are software driven and CIOs top priority is to provide access to data and applications 24/7 for an always-on availability. According to 2016 Veeam Availability Report , on average, enterprises are facing annual increase of unplanned downtime events of 15% and taking far greater amount of time to recover. This is the gap, known as an “Availability Gap”, between the requirements of the Always-On Enterprise and IT’s ability to deliver. 84% of CIOs acknowledge they currently have an availability gap and it’s costing them up to $16 million annually in lost revenue and productivity. In today’s economy, where speed, reliability and customer experience is the key to success, such a gap will have a negative impact on customer confidence and brand integrity.
Enterprises will need to start investing in modernising their datacentres with virtualisation, storage and cloud technologies to meet today`s business needs by enabling five key capabilities: high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified recoverability, leveraged data and complete visibility.
High-speed recovery
On average almost half of an enterprise’s workloads are mission-critical with no sign of decreasing. Availability will become more important as a greater proportion of the workload is critical to organizational functions. An enterprise should consider improving their data centre capability to deliver a recovery time and point objectives of less then 15 minutes for all applications and data, as a benchmark.
Data loss avoidance
It is critical that enterprises should have confidence in their backup system, to ensure its availability at the time of need. Thus, backups need to be created for any storage, leverage the cloud, be simply managed and compliant to archiving policies.
Verified recoverability
Enterprises need to be able to guarantee recovery of all files, application, and virtual server every time. Recovery solutions need to just work with the least or no human intervention; this can be achieved by verifying the recoverability of every backup and test every restore point in every virtual machine replica automatically.
Leveraged data
Enterprises need to go beyond just “backup” of their data. It is about having the ability to create a low-risk deployment in a production-like test environment and complete with network management. Allowing enterprises to deploy software, upgrades, patches and more with less risk and fewer issues – saving time and money.
Complete visibility
If problems are not visible or alerted it cannot be corrected. Enterprises need to ensure they have a technology solution that proactively monitors and alerts any issues, in real-time, before it becomes an operational impact. Allowing enterprises the opportunity to remove the guesswork from capacity planning is key to optimise resources for optimal performance.
CIOs need to have a clear view of their business-critical service portfolio to have the ability to meet SLAs in line with business expectations, and classify workloads for deployment either in the cloud, on-premise or hybrid. With the advancement of technology and cloud, cloud-based automated backup solutions will help to maintain the trust that data can be easily restored to a prior state as and when needed.
As CIOs start to build their Always-On Enterprise, it is imperative that business continuity, disaster recovery, and data resiliency should be the foundation to excel at the nimble models for technology development and management. This equips them to not only adapt and pre-empt market changes and satisfy customers but also stay ahead of the competition and gain business advantage.
Authored by Gregg Petersen – Regional Director, MEA and SAARC Veeam Software
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