Data backup capability is a common face among the forgotten and neglected that turn up for every game, but seldom make it onto the funding field. Yet it’s something employees and customers, in the absence of any direct interaction, simply assume is operating at a level that will meet their expectations.

When innovation outstrips its supporting foundations

The demand for product and service innovation continues to climb in a self-feeding spiral. Today’s celebrated innovation is tomorrow’s must-have. That’s how a once perfectly good backup solution quickly becomes woefully inadequate. Expectations change. The budget-winning improvements to applications, business processes and customer services have significantly elevated performance expectations to a level that the incumbent backup solution can’t even begin to meet.

Has your backup and recovery kept pace?

Of course, most organisations know they have a backup solution. They are aware it may not be state-of-the-art, but often have no idea how far it has fallen behind their perceptions, let alone customer expectations.

In a recent annual survey by the Enterprise Strategy Group, 77% of decision makers said their organisation had a data protection gap. Specifically, they have a gap between how often they can back up applications and how often the need to be backed up to be an always-on organisation.

Almost the same percentage reported a gap in how fast they can recover applications. Despite the best efforts of IT teams around the globe, the results have not changed significantly over the last three years of the annual survey. Clearly the problem is not only widespread, it’s ongoing.

Too many organisations are playing with fire

The Enterprise Strategy Group’s report points out the importance of organisations recognising the precariousness of their IT systems and not trivialising downtime when it occurs. They calculated that one in four servers suffers at least one unplanned outage a year. Many organisations are playing a game of chance with significant internal and external ramifications.

Responses from the organisations surveyed showed:

• For high priority applications, the acceptable data loss time is 72 minutes, but they only protect this data every 127 minutes on average
• For normal applications, the accepted loss is 240 minutes of data, but they’re only protecting it every 352 minutes on average

The steps to put things right

The first step to closing the gap is to admit you have a problem and set about quantifying it. If you turn out to be one of the 20% that don’t have a gap, at least you’ll know for sure and you’ll have a mechanism for regularly monitoring the gap in future.

The second step is to quantify the current expectations or service level agreements of your internal business units and customers, then compare them to your real-world capabilities.

Step three is to calculate your gaps and convert them into the economic and employee/customer perception impacts to your organisation.

Re-visiting what it means to be ‘always-on’

Armed with an up-to-date understanding of your availability gaps and their impacts, it’s time to revisit what’s required for your organisation to be ‘always-on’. This will typically involve addressing your virtualised systems.

At this stage, it’s important to factor in the increasing role that homogeneous and hybrid cloud environments will inevitably have, including the opportunities and new rules they bring for backup and recovery. It’s also essential to move from seeing backup frequency as a metric for your IT scorecard, to an essential prerequisite for successful virtualisation and digital transformation initiatives.

Download a free copy of the full report today

Veeam® is a global provider of the tools specialists use to help organisations achieve exceptional levels of backup and data recovery. They commissioned the Enterprise Strategy Group to report on how enterprises around the world are dealing with growing demand for data and application availability.

To learn more about availability levels, their impacts on businesses and the steps to put things right, download a free copy of the latest Veeam® Availability report.