It’s been an eventful last few weeks in the world of data protection.
As if the challenges we have faced over the last 12 months weren’t enough, the threats posed by cybercrime, hardware failure, and other accidents have been on full display recently with two data loss / downtime events hitting the newswires:
Every company using these technologies and services has been impacted. That is an unfortunate certainty. To be clear, this is not a hit piece on Microsoft or OVH Cloud. Far from it. Instead, this is a reality-check that these events can and do happen. Next time it could be a different company’s software, another provider, or a different type of hack. But it’s a certainty that it’s going to happen again.
What is NOT a certainty, however, is that the data loss and downtime needs to be costly or have a long-term effect on your business.
Let’s step back.
All companies value data and downtime differently. In this case, the value of the data depends on the type of business you are in. The impact of data loss and downtime is directly related to how your business uses data. For companies that have sensitive customer data, or that cannot operate during downtime, the impact of the above scenarios can be significant.
But there are steps we can take today to reduce this impact. We just need to prioritize them.
We know that the right backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions can protect against data loss and downtime. But many companies do not categorize these solutions as “mission-critical”. In fact, just a few years ago, only 23% of customers protected all their applications with DR, and only 45% covered their mission-critical applications. We have talked about the business benefits of backup and DR before at iland in terms of cost and efficiency, but let’s use these recent events to look at backup and DR from a business viability perspective.
Mission-critical is often used to describe application priority relative to budget and resources. In other words, applications that collect and use customer data, help operate a business, or support customers are often given preference. For example, a CRM application might be deployed with more RAM or allocated high end solid state disk for best performance.
But what happens when these applications go down or data is lost? At this point, the fact that these applications were running on high end equipment is irrelevant. What matters now is whether the application and data can be recovered and brought back online fast (if at all). The definition of mission-critical is now much different.
Given that we know data loss and downtime are a certainty, doesn’t it make sense to categorize the backup and recovery of mission-critical applications as mission-critical?
The bottom line is that wherever your data resides, whatever software you use, and whichever vendor supports you, no provider or software is infallible and (ultimately) you are responsible for protecting your own business interests. The good news is that there are MANY solutions available that can protect and recover your critical applications (and, therefore, preserve the mission of your business). The challenge may just be to prioritize them this way.
iland will be hosting a webinar on this topic in the coming week. Join Us to learn more.
