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"Better Business Continuity is a top priority for companies of all sizes in 2021. The Channel will be called upon to help clients face the future with confidence. According to Hitachi Vantara, for that kind of resiliency you need to ensure continuous operations with triple redundancy, held to the strictest of service levels."
- Erin Mikan, Channel Sales Manager, Hitachi Vantara ANZ
We’re still reeling from 2020, but there’s a certain sense of hopefulness that comes with weathering the pandemic as well as we have here in Australia and New Zealand. Your clients are taking stock of the measures they put in place to deal with the impact of Covid19, learning lessons and identifying where they still have work to do. For many, that will include modernising to ensure they can keep operating effectively, without loss of data, through the next unprecedented event, outage, cyberattack or data disruption.
Here are 4 Business Continuity Developments we see progressing this year.
1. Dispelling the Illusion of Business Continuity
Today’s interconnected world and the ability the business world has shown to keep on working through this pandemic, may give the illusion of business continuity.
The rapid surge in remote work and all the other aspects of dealing with a pandemic through shutdowns, lock downs, quarantines and border closures have opened the eyes of C-suites and IT team. In many cases they realise that their business continuity plans – now tested, are not cutting it. Some of them had plans that were on paper only and never actually trialled. For too many, disaster recovery and general resiliency were found to be lacking in these uncertain times.
In some cases they won’t recognise the flaws in their existing BC/DR strategy and you will have to help them understand what they need to do to be better-prepared for the next “unprecedented” world event that could be lurking just around the corner.
Ok that’s a bit chilling, but 2020 has been chilling. It’s simply a reality that Australian businesses of all shapes and sizes, like companies all over the world, need better procedures, recovery capabilities and infrastructure so they can build confidently from here.
2. Contingency as a Service
It can be quite concerning to hear enterprise and mid-size businesses refer to their move to the cloud as if it provides quick solutions for modernising their Disaster Recovery plans. Some are relying on the use of snapshots, which is not a proper, robust backup strategy. Others point to their back up data in the same public cloud as their main data repository, which is risky. Unfortunately, hyperscalers are not impervious to outages, as we have seen numerous times in the past few years. Just like a good money strategy, diversification is key to minimising the risk of total loss. Organisations that realise they mustn’t put all their data stores into one basket will be looking to partners to help them structure or restructure their BC/DR strategies.
We can see a very near future when Contingency as a Service is a highly sought after offering from experienced IT integrators and consultancies in conjunction with cloud providers and technology vendors. In the meantime, many of you in the Channel will have clients depending on you to provide Contingency Planning or Contingency Advice services in some form or another.
3. The Pursuit of Zero Data Loss
Thanks to technological advances in storage-based data services, including active-active storage clustering and highly efficient long-distance replication, it’s no longer necessary for organisations to be satisfied with two-site DR architecture.
3-data-center (3DC) architectures dramatically improve protection against permanent data loss and corruption of data, provide the foundation for much faster system recovery and can even mitigate the need for recovery.
It is now available even for smaller organisations that have requirements for always-on operations but don’t have large enterprise budgets.
4. Identifying Right-sized Solutions for Australian Businesses
Size matters, when it comes to IT infrastructure, because it impacts requirements and budget availability. But mid-size businesses rely on business critical applications as much as the largest of enterprise organisations do.
This is a critical point here in Australia, because global vendors tend to talk about solutions for “mid-size businesses” by the standards of larger markets. Depending on the segment definition, even large Australian companies can fall into the mid-size category.
To help your clients, look for solutions that offer the kind of resiliency, low latency, high performance and cost effective storage the “large enterprise” category enjoys. Prioritise right-sized, next generation options for BC/DR.
It could be that, in an emergency, only 20 or 30% of their total data would be required immediately to keep them up and running, supporting their business or customer.
For those clients who are on a tighter budget, partners can provide a significant value add by helping to prioritise data and applications as part of their overall business continuity strategy. Source flexible options, pricing and consumption models designed for mid-size use cases.
Business Continuity is a Priority for 2021
Australian businesses need a wide-ranging contingency plan for data access and protection, to be able to move the most critical data when required and have somewhere to put it, and to allow employees and stakeholders to securely access and save data from wherever they are. It must have the fundamentals of security, compliance and auditability.
And, thanks to our collective experience with pandemic situations where people were not allowed to enter the workplace – or the data centre – there is an understanding that business continuity measures should be able to be managed remotely.
Removing the risks of downtime and permanent data loss have become business imperatives.
For info on how we can help provide your clients with high availability, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery solutions, contact Hitachi Vantara.
Find info on Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) solutions for midsize companies, complete with Global Active Device Management for nonstop operations here.
Love an info-packed webinar designed for the Channel?
Here’s your invite to Building the Right Channel Ecosystem: Taking a Data-Driven Approach to Scale and Complexity featuring panellists from Hitachi Vantara, Cisco and VMware. It’s happening on 17th March 2:00pm AEDT so register at the above link, today!
