The business impact from data loss and downtime remains staggering and a large majority of businesses are behind the curve in the maturity of their data protection strategies. IT leaders and management continue to underestimate the business costs associated with downtime and the potential damage resulting from business disruption.

Today, business markets and the cloud have become increasingly connected, therefore it is critical that organizations protect their data and make sure it is always available. Most organizations today have complex and disparate environments and will need to have strategies in place to protect their information wherever it resides, whatever the application that generates it or they they’ll put their businesses at significant risk and jeopardize profits.

The Consequences of Disruption

What are the most common consequences of data loss, disruption and downtime to businesses?

• Loss of Employee Productivity
• Loss of Revenue
• Loss of customer confidence / loyalty
• Loss of customers or repeat business
• Loss of new business opportunity or loss of business to a competitor
• Delay in getting products or services to market
• Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure
• Corporate Image. Shows clients and stakeholders that you take the integrity of their information very seriously.
• Privacy. Not bound by US Patriot Act.

Have you calculated the impact of such an event to your business?

Have you done an assessment to pinpoint your areas of vulnerabilities recently?

The Causes of Disruption

Some of the leading causes of these major issues are: 

• Hardware and software failure
• Loss of power or backup power
• Data corruption
• Accidental human error
• Security breach such as malware, spyware, viruses, botnets, or cyber-terrorism
• Physical Security such as loss or theft of equipment
• Deliberate employee sabotage
• Natural disasters

The survey reported that a staggering 71% of those surveyed said they were not fully confident that they could recover systems/data today from all platforms. In another recent research, the State of Resilience Report 2015, the top five reasons stated for data loss include storage failure, the lack of a backup copy, human error, a data protection program malfunction, a data protection solution that's down for maintenance, and corrupt data.

How can you improve your data protection strategy?

Is your business struggling with the capital resources required to keep pace using traditional, inefficient backup solutions?

You’re not alone…most businesses have these challenges. But consider the cloud which offers a new opportunity to “pay as you go” (operational expense), and an option for data protection that will address this challenge. A cloud data protection solution for your IT Infrastructure can deliver a fail-safe unified backup and disaster recovery solution able to recover your files, volumes, servers and complete environment. This will dramatically reduce the time and costs associated with data protection across your enterprise.

Some of the strategies to eliminate the top risk factors I would suggest are:

• Hosted Infrastructure Solutions
• Managed Services and Cloud Services such as:
• Cloud Backup
• Hosted Storage
• Managed Recovery

Primary Benefits

• Meets SLAs through fast and reliable processes
• Simple and efficient to streamline the process of managing your own backup and recovery.
• Supports your business continuity plans.
• Complies with regulations requiring offsite storage, encryption and data archiving/destruction.
• Pay as you grow licensing model allowing you to align the value of your data with the cost of protecting it.
• The services are charged on a monthly 'usage' basis.
• Provides your IT Resources time to focus on other priorities.

Do your homework to find an experienced and dependable service provider
(Refer to my previous blog: How to Keep Your Data Safe – Always posted on Friday, January 30, 2015)
There are many benefits to moving to an outsourced model for some of your IT Needs. Here is a short list of a few of the benefits that you can use when preparing your business case.

Benefits of Outsourcing Services to mitigate root causes of failure

• Provide “high availability” for your VM’s. It will eliminate the number one cause: hardware failure
• Hosting your environment in a Tier III Certified Data Centre to eliminate the risk of a power failure, the number 2 cause.
• Proactive infrastructure management by certified professionals to address the remaining threats.
• Low Opex vs. the high capital investment it would take to try and build an improved level of availability and data protection yourself.

Assessing your Preparedness
The first place to look in assessing your preparedness to a disruption event is the success rate of your nightly data backups. This is often the Achilles heel to a disaster recovery strategy or a business continuity process where my client has not successfully backed up the data he needs to restore his business. A thorough assessment by a Business Continuity expert will help you understand where you have the greatest exposure and what solution or service is required to eliminate the threats.

This can help:

• Quantify the value of the proposed solution and justify the spend
• Establish RPO’s and RTO’s as a foundation for SLA’s to now be put into place  

Addressing the risk factors
If downtime and data loss is a constant concern for your organization, you can turn to Sentia for assistance. We can provide you with an assessment to uncover your data protection vulnerabilities and gaps. We can also help you develop a risk-balanced strategy designed to protect your data and more importantly, align your strategy with your current business needs and plan for the future.

Feel free to contact me for advice and to discuss your challenges and business needs.
Paul Israel, Senior Services Account Executive
905.508.8489, ext. 344
Sentia