Letting an organisation’s storage and backup infrastructure fall behind the times is fraught with risk – from steeply rising costs and compromised performance to a lack of preparedness if disaster should strike. Bill Mansfield outlines six of the common benefits that flow from storage and backup modernisation programmes.
Backup and Storage
It’s hardly the most glamourous subject, but there is no getting away from its importance. From security and compliance to disaster recovery - storage and backup is something CIOs neglect at their peril.
There are many, many problems associated with creaking, out of date storage and backup, and some can be catastrophic. For instance, according to recent research, 40 percent of businesses fail to reopen after a disaster, and another 25 percent fail entirely within the first post-disaster year.
One of the chief reasons? Data. That is, if an organisation’s backup system was designed before data volumes began to grow exponentially - or before IT infrastructures became highly virtualised - the company may find itself awaking from a disaster with a debilitating case of corporate amnesia. Quite simply, the loss of business-critical data leaves those businesses without the data - the corporate memory - they need to recover.
The key to avoiding this kind of terminal scenario is modernisation – and the good news is the benefits are not limited to ‘what if’ disaster situations. Here are the six benefits most commonly realised by organisations updating their data storage and backup infrastructures:
- Less wasted time: Modernisation reduces administrative effort by providing simpler user interfaces, greatly increasing performance and capacity, and introducing a model for scaling that reduces reanalysis and procurement time.
- Unified backup and DR: A single, unified solution supporting both backup and disaster recovery cuts complexity and, as a result, management overheads.
- More from existing investments: Newer technologies lower costs and allow the company to derive more value from existing investments.
- Increased performance: The modernisation approach enables deployment of additional storage options - such as flash, SAN or NAS disk tiers, tape and cloud - to improve responsiveness and performance.
- Streamlined recovery: A modern solution will give the organisation the ability to more quickly recover applications and data from diverse environments.
- Manageable growth: Following modernisation, it is easier to manage data growth by deploying global de-duplication and rapid snapshot-based protection.