Computerworld

Veeam: Enterprises waste over $2m each on data availability failures

“The availability of IT is more important than ever... yet businesses globally are being failed by an IT industry."

Enterprises waste over $2 million each year on data availability failures, with 82 per cent of CIOs admitting they are unable to meet their business’s need for immediate, always-on access to IT services.

According to recent Veeam Software findings, this availability gap has immediate costs as well as lost revenue, damaging productivity, opportunities and data which is irretrievably lost through backups failing to recover.

Results of the Veeam Data Center Availability Report 2014, claim costs will only increase as the global economy requires enterprises to work with partners, customers and stakeholders across time zones, pressuring data centre assets to be always-on no matter the location.

With emerging markets predicted to generate 40 per cent of global growth within the next 15 years, missing global opportunities due to downtime can cause irrevocable damage.

“The availability of IT is more important than ever,” says Ratmir Timashev, CEO, Veeam.

“Yet businesses globally are being failed by an IT industry that has led them to believe they have to accept downtime, and that the Always-On Business is nothing but a fantasy.

“This isn’t acceptable. Organisations can’t afford to lose millions of dollars from IT failures, nor can they continue to gamble with data availability.

“The good news is things are set to change. Organisations just need to throw away what they’ve been told for years about availability and demand better.

“If every organisation does this, then in five years application availability will become a redundant topic as consumers and employees across the planet access what they want, when they want it.”

Timashev believes businesses are already calling for greater availability yet IT departments are missing the recovery time objective (RTO) their businesses demand for mission-critical data by more than an hour and are more than 2.5 hours away from the always-on standards set by modern availability solutions.

Even more troubling for Timashev, organisations are missing the required recovery point objective (RPO); i.e., how often data is backed up, by 1.5 hours, and they are a staggering 4.5 hours away from modern always-on standards.

“Make no mistake, we are already in the era of the Always-On Business,” Timashev adds. “To keep pace, enterprises need entirely new types of solutions that enable 24/7 availability in a way that legacy data protection and backup products could never do.

“This means high-speed, guaranteed recovery of every file, application or virtual server when needed. It means leveraging backup data and environments to test the deployment of new applications, mitigating the risk of failure.

“And it means complete visibility, with proactive monitoring and alerting of issues before they affect operations.

“CIOs clearly recognise this, with 78 percent planning to change their data protection product in the next two years in order to get the availability that they need. As a result, the availability gap will start to become a thing of the past.”