BLOG

Modernize your Backup: Why Customers will Pay Attention to You

09-Aug-2018 04:40 PM

Posted by Prashanth G J, CEO, Technobind

Data Loss is arguably the single biggest fear encountered by IT today. No matter what the causes are, a data loss event results in serious repercussions for the organization. The impact of downtime, both on IT as well as on business, is immediate and overarching. 64 percent IT pros consider a data loss event as a life or death situation for their business, according to an IDC study conducted in the past.

Many a times, we have seen organizations investing in the wrong technology or solution, in a desperate attempt to ensure zero-downtime and an always-on infrastructure. Worse is the fact that many customers have not upgraded their Backup strategy and technology over the years, despite technologies related to storage, security, management having scaled multiple new refreshes.

To add to their woes, today's digitization initiatives and increasing number of cyber incidents throw very difficult data challenges at the IT department. The result: data protection sprawl, increased cost, and lesser recovery confidence!

The good news is, IT folks today do realize the need to overhaul the legacy approach to backup and recovery. Backup modernization is an inevitable path they need to go down, to achieve better service levels, improved data recovery and real-time data protection. Their success however will depend largely on how they choose the right technology and the right partner.

Ending the Endpoint Backup Woes

Studies indicate that as much as 40 percent of an organization's data is stored uniquely on endpoints, mainly the laptops and mobile devices.

This means that close to half of an organization's data sits outside the data centres, roaming freely in coffee shops, airports, and other public spaces. Ever wondered how many of your customer organizations include these endpoints in their data protection strategy? Not many, I bet!

Let me tell you why. The conventional endpoint backup strategy required that individual users manually backup their data to the data center. Historically, people never ever backup their data. Besides, these devices are always on the move, don't always have full network connectivity to facilitate backup.

Endpoint data protection is thus probably the trickiest area for a CIO. But, are they ready to risk that 40 percent data? Definitely not. And thats where a partner can add great value, by helping customers to include various endpoints in their data retention policy.

Today we have helped partners deploy solutions that offer greater control to IT, without causing inconvenience to the end users. If bandwidth or complexity or scalability is a concern for your customers, there are innovative solutions to fit diverse requirements. The customer will also have the choice to decide whether or not to send data to the cloud.

A recent study by one of our technology partners, Carbonite, points to some interesting facts about how much the IT pros value data. The study revealed a list of things that IT pros will willingly give up, rather than encountering a data loss. And the list actually includes things like internet connection, cell service, wedding ring and even their internal organs! Joking aside, the threat of downtime is the biggest driver for todays business continuity purchase decisions.

Many of our partners in India have already taken this drift quite seriously and are proactively addressing some of their customer's data recovery concerns. Some of the most data-savvy organizations have in fact redefined their recovery metrics completely, specifically the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for faster than normal recoveries and minimal data loss.

Today's data recovery and backup solutions we carry have been able to leverage this need in the market and monetize the same.

So, go ahead and challenge a CIO! Ask them how much downtime can be endured before they recover the data. And, what would be the cost to the business when the backup data is hours old! The fact is, today's desirable RPO is zero, and RTO is less than one minute! And companies can achieve these new standards at a much lesser cost as compared to their legacy recovery solutions.

The promise of better SLAs instantly opens up newer opportunities for solution partners. All you need is a compelling portfolio of backup modernization solutions and technologies.