‘Availability’ is the new constant

India is witnessing a wave of digital transformation and as we welcome the era of enhanced connectivity, improved bandwidth and upgraded devices, the ease and affordability to access the internet has been the highlight of this digital transformation. The agility of the workforces has altered the digiverse in a way that constant access to products and services is often taken for granted. As a result, organisations face the daunting task of recovering any IT service or application within minutes – creating what is eventually known as ‘Availability’. Change is said to be the only constant. Therefore, with the new wave of digital technology, ‘Availability’ should be made the new constant. Many enterprises have resorted to modern data centres built on virtualisation, modern storage solutions and cloud-based services yet most of them cannot deliver the availability needed in the seamless operation of enterprises due to challenges like downtime.

According to Veeam Availability report 2017, 87% Indian CIOs admitted to an availability gap (the gap between users demand for uninterrupted access to services and what businesses and IT can deliver). However, businesses using legacy based backup tools takes hours and weeks to restore data and are not best suited to meet the availability gap. Indian organisations face a growing gap between increasing demand for IT services, driven by rapid digital expansion, and unplanned downtime. Availability challenges cost Rs 150 crore annually on average.

Every minute of downtime doesn’t just lead to major losses but also impacts the brand reputation, employee productivity and customer loyalty negatively. Hence, ‘Availability’ is mission-critical for smooth business operations, 24/7 access to data, high-speed recovery of lost data and complete visibility paving the enterprise’s way to become ‘Always-on’.

Here are a few capabilities of adopting the new constant:

Cloud computing and mobility

The explosion in mobility has become the main driver of cloud’s evolution. Along with the pervasiveness of mobile devices comes the question of how to manage that data profile, and provide data availability.

To begin with, mobile’s data growth is explosive. How do we decide on what is valuable information, and what is noise? Should we keep everything? Should we categorise everything? Everything that your mobile device sends to the service provider - do they keep that forever? Do they need to? If yes, is it because of regulations, or because of compliance? The fact is that organisations are having to make those decisions now because the volume of data is challenging the underlying structures of cloud on a scale that’s never been seen before, and it’s only set to escalate.

Thanks to increasing mobility, the rise of consumers’ demands has driven cloud adoption, as cloud currently underpins all the data that organisations mine and utilise. As app and cloud providers struggle to keep pace, cloud has already started to evolve beyond availability, and into the Internet of Things (IoT) and all its ensuing data points that can be captured. The next phase of data management will be from the data profile stemming from IoT wearables and other smart devices, while IoT itself simply becomes ‘things’ against the backdrop of the cloud.

How then, do we provide availability for all that data, since having any sort of downtime is now unacceptable? Mobility doesn’t just affect consumers – it affects organisations as well as many different industries that rely on mobile services, and the data that is available through them, such as healthcare. The business cycle has a global scope, and it’s no longer five days a week, eight hours a day.

Internet of Things and Big Data

Combined together, IoT and Big Data represent a massive data lifecycle that, over time, becomes a self-running engine. The huge amount of data created by IoT is fed into Big Data’s compound to be analysed and warehoused, and eventually fed out back into IoT. To sustain this data lifecycle, a modern data centre needs to be built. As the modern data centre typically leverages core technologies including virtualisation, storage and cloud, the next crucial consideration would be ensuring the availability of these modern data centres to ensure Always-On services.

The applications are still important

While all of these shifts in the data center are happening at the same time, one thing hasn’t changed: the application is still what is most important. In fact, the data center is nothing without the applications it provides. The availability requirements today extend to the applications and in part due to mobilization and constant access; but also how businesses truly run today.

Gone are the days where key business decision makers didn’t need to consult their key systems to make strategic decisions. These decisions are all powered by applications in the data center. But what happens when something goes awry with the applications? The challenge facing data center professionals today is to ensure that the applications are available; not just the infrastructure. But today businesses want more; they want to avoid issues before they happen. That’s a pretty tall order that is one of the benefits that data center availability can bring.

With technology outages now making front-page news, minimising downtime and data loss is critical to the overall health of organisations. Data and services will evolve both on premises and in the cloud, and organisations have to think about how to better protect their data on both fronts. Tool selection will become critical as organisations attempt to bridge the availability gap. This is the gap between being Always-On and the cost and complexity required to be so.

Ashok Acharya
Regional Director, India and SAARC region, Veeam Software

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