Bridging the Availability Gap: Ensuring Business Continuity for an Always-On Enterprise

The next generation of enterprises will no longer operate within the confines of their own “four walls”. The reality modern enterprises face is the need to break down these “four walls” to include customers, partners, suppliers, employees and every stakeholder which it impacts within its ecosystem. This environment forces data and applications to be Hyper-Available 24X7X365, this makes nearly all systems critical to business operations and downtime is no longer an option. Every hour of downtime will significantly impact brand reputation, revenue, customer loyalty, and employee productivity.

Modern enterprises are software-driven businesses, bringing a host of new technologies that needs to be managed differently in datacentres. At the edge, will be mobile devices and at the core, hardware of servers, storage and network equipment, making the datacentre ecosystem more complex. This will force IT departments to deliver a business continuity strategy, which ensures an Always-On enterprise. Due to such complexities enterprises are facing annual increase of unplanned downtime events resulting in great amount of time to recover. According to Veeam Availability report 2017, 82% of enterprises are facing the ‘Availability Gap’, i.e. gap between user demand and what IT can deliver. This is costing enterprises up to $21.9 million annually in loss revenue and productivity.

To achieve and maintain a high level of Hyper-Availability of data, IT departments must have a clear understanding of the factors affecting availability. Today’s modern enterprise thrive on big data, mobility and social platforms and CIOs should recognize that legacy systems are no longer capable of managing this new business requirements to make their organizations ‘Highly Available’. In order to deliver availability as an Always-On business, enterprises should be equipped with high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance and complete visibility solutions that are delivered using virtualization, cloud & storage.

To deliver business continuity, CIOs should understand the right approach to make their organizations ‘Always-Available’.

Critical systems driving the demand for an Always-On Enterprise

enterprises’ business requirements are becoming increasingly dependent on technology to perform everyday tasks. As applications become more interconnected, it increases the dependency and inherently the complexity to make the entire chain of applications critical. In this scenario, CIOs are tasked in determining the relative criticality of systems within an enterprise’s IT ecosystem. This is a difficult task as each business unit feels their application is of utmost importance. Hence, it is important to derive true criticality of systems and applications through measures that are driven by business and financial performance.

Addressing the Availability Gap

Far-reaching internal and customer-facing implications of downtime, it is increasing the gap between business expectations and IT’s ability to deliver them. This is due to the mismatched business expectations from technology capabilities whilst recovering from major business disruptions. Enterprises need to understand their business-critical service portfolio to meet SLAs in line with business expectations, and classify workloads for deployment either in the cloud, on-premise or hybrid.

Cloud services to build resiliency

Cloud gives enterprises the ability to scale up resources on demand while reducing costs during idle periods. For effective utilization of cloud, it is important to understand the workloads and applications to best serve in a cloud environment. Cloud-based automated backup solutions are best designed to accurately capture the real time and simplify services restoration. As a result cloud is being touted as, the solution, in the market to play a critical role in achieving availability strategy.

Technology management is critical to accelerate a digital business and it is intolerant to legacy IT practices. CIOs need to have a clear view of their business-critical service portfolio to have the ability to meet SLAs in line with business expectations. Furthermore it is critical to classify workloads suitable for deployment in the cloud and evaluate cloud-based disaster recovery possibilities with automated backup solutions. As CIOs start to build an Always-On Enterprise, it is imperative that business continuity, disaster recovery, and data resiliency be the foundation to excel at the nimble models for technology development and management. Thus having the ability to adapt and pre-empt market changes and satisfy customers before the competition even knows what happened.

Sandeep Bhambure
Managing Director, India and SAARC, Veeam Software