TRENDING
To better understand
Availability challenges,
Veeam commissioned the
Enterprise Strategy Group
to survey more than 1,000
business professionals and
senior decision makers for
the sixth annual Veeam
Availability report. This
includes respondents from
UAE and Saudi Arabia. The
research study reveals that
organisations across the
globe continue to struggle
with Availability assurance
within their IT environments.
By Arun Shankar.
T
he unfortunate reality is that too many business-
accelerating and digital transformation initiatives
are being hindered by inadequacies in IT system
Availability. Because teams are burdened with keeping
existing systems running, they are not able to move systems
and architecture forward to help their organisations evolve.
The first and most crucial step in ensuring viability of IT
systems providing service to business units and customers
is to accept that there is an Availability Gap. Too many
organisations lack accurate metrics or monitoring processes
and presume their systems are sufficient. Instead, presume
there is a problem and then quantify it.
Next, quantify the business unit’s service level agreements
and assess the protection mechanisms and recovery
capabilities. Only by comparing your Availability and
protection expectations with real-world capabilities will you
be able to determine the size of the gaps in the strategy.
Convert gaps into impact analysis by simply asking, if a
system were to fail, what would that cost? By looking at
past system logs, most will discover that systems have had
interruptions in the past, which can now be quantified as
business impact.
Organisations must address the Availability and
Protection Gaps that they have, or they put their
employees and their institutions at risk.
With an accurate understanding of the frequency and
duration of outages within the environment, compared
with the service level agreement expectations of your
constituents, and an assessment of the economic and
perception impacts on an organisation, it is possible to
reimagine what it would take to become an Always-On
Enterprise. Moving forward, reducing downtime and data
loss will require decision makers to acknowledge that
downtime and data loss have costs, so doing nothing
will cost more than any solution. Meanwhile, technical
decision makers will need to reimagine that Availability and
protection really are attainable.
This is possible, if you first stop using legacy approaches
and embrace an IT strategy that is underpinned by agile
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