If your people are still manually backing up data and applications, you’re putting the lifeblood of your business in the hands of human error. It’s too easy to start thinking that backups can wait until there’s time, because your chances of needing to recover from a disaster in the immediate future are ‘pretty slim’, but somehow the spare time required for backing up never eventuates.

Backups don’t call to complain

Backups don’t chew your ear when their job hasn’t been done, but your customers and colleagues sure do. So they get priority. And regular backups don’t write bad reviews of your business, which is another reason they get ignored.

Any IT person will tell you that the longer each backup is ignored, the longer it will take to complete. It’s like dirty laundry, piling up in your guilty conscience until you’re facing the wash day from hell.

You’re always on, so it’s hard to be off

Being ‘always on’ is another common reason given for backups not happening. Where is the window of time when systems are offline? Sometimes it doesn’t exist.

When your business is customer-driven, it can’t operate on an inflexible fixed timeline. So there’s no ‘right time’ to regularly be offline for a scheduled automated backup. Instead you have to back up manually, during a calm spot.  Good luck with that.

Availability is the new competitive edge

The time between backups and how long it takes to restore lost data and applications is known as ‘availability’. The shorter your backup intervals and restoration times, the higher your availability. If your internal and external customers expect you to be ‘always on’, you need a very high availability.

In the private, public or hybrid cloud, businesses can have automated backup tools to support very high availability. With these in place, their people can rely on being able to immediately use new data as it arrives, no matter where it has come from, knowing there’s no chance of it becoming unavailable because of system downtime. This means they can consistently deliver faster, more relevant and higher quality products and services than their competitors.

It’s in your best interests to find out more

For more than a decade, Veeam® has been producing tools that enable cloud specialists to help organisations achieve higher organisational availability. They commissioned the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) to survey and report on whether enterprises around the world are meeting availability goals, what they see as the impacts of inadequate availability and how their availability level is affecting business strategies.

The 2017 report’s executive summary reveals:

• 82% of enterprises say their IT availability is not meeting business unit and customer expectations
• $21.8m is the average financial cost of availability and protection gaps for the surveyed enterprises
• 66% admit their digital transformation initiatives are being held back by unplanned downtime

To understand why so many organisations are in this position, the impacts and the recommended steps for solving the problem, download a free copy of the full Veeam® Availability report.