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.
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There are many, many problems associated with creaking, out of date storage and backup, and some can be catastrophic.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:
