For enterprises the question is no longer, “Are we backed up?” The question is now, “Are we always available?"
It’s not enough to just back up the data anymore. That’s why Veeam Software has declared March 30 as World Availability Day.
Designed to draw attention to the need for enterprise data centre availability, the tech giant says the occasion asks crucial questions in the backup industry.
Can IT guarantee that customers, partners and employees will have access to their applications and data 24/7?
Does IT operate a data centre that is Always-On?
If an application goes down, can IT bring it back up in 15 minutes?
"World Availability Day will reinforce the need for Availability for Modern Data Center that can deliver the Always-On Business, an environment that modern businesses require," a Veeam statement says.
"For global enterprises, employees, customers and partners expect to have access to the data centre anytime.
"Unfortunately, that’s not happening - 82 percent of CIOs admit that they are unable to meet that expectation according to a recent industry survey commissioned by Veeam.
"This may also explain why 81 percent of enterprises are currently involved in data center modernization to meet the increasing demands for 24/7 access to IT services and applications, and to enable an Always-On Business."
Why? For starters, the company claims it takes IT an average of 2.9 hours to recover a mission critical application, and 8.5 hours to recover other applications.
"No employee or customer will accept being without access to a critical application for even a few hours," Veeam adds.
"It’s good that a backup exists, but if someone has to retrieve the tape from the depths of a warehouse across town before a restore can even begin, the problem is far from solved.
"Especially if the backup itself won’t restore. CIOs say that when disaster strikes and they need to restore data, they find that 1 in 6 backups fail, on average, which isn’t surprising, since organisations only test about five percent of their backups each quarter to ensure they’re not corrupted.
"But beyond the simple frustration that employees, partners and customers may experience, the current situation is expensive."
According to Veeam research, downtime and lost data cost the average business as much as $10 million annually.
"Businesses don’t need backup," the company adds. "They need availability. But until very recently, 24/7 availability was out of reach for all but the biggest enterprises."
