The IT infrastructures of many companies are struggling, usually failing, to deliver business continuity in the event of severe data outages, based on research commissioned by StorageCraft. It also shows global concern about the risk and business impact of unrestricted and rampant data growth.

Data Volume Will Increase 10x or more in Next Five Years:

The majority of the respondents (86%) believe that the volume of data will grow 10x or more in the next five years. And 80% of the respondents expressed concern about the business impact and risk it will have on their company when they were asked about the potential impact of this growth.

With the respondents citing the following potential risks from not being able to manage data growth adequately, the research reveals far-reaching business implications;

  • 29% envisage that strategic projects will fail
  • 47% foresee an inability to recover fast enough in the event of a data outage
  • 29% envisage that strategic projects will fail
  • 64% expect an increase in operational costs
  • 25% predict that revenue generation will lag

Companies are already struggling with data growth and their ability to recover in the event of an outage.

  • 40% of the respondents believe it would take up to an entire day to recover
  • Just 15% of the respondents have an IT infrastructure that enables them to recover from a severe data loss within an hour
  • 25% of the respondents estimate data recovery would take them days or weeks

Companies Cannot Keep Up with Volume and Complexity of Data Management:

According to Shridar Subramanian, vice president of marketing and product management, StorageCraft; despite the heroic efforts of IT managers to maintain the continuity and performance of their IT infrastructures, we are about to reach an inflection point where companies cannot keep up with the complexity and volume of data management.

The fact that more than 25% of companies participating in the research are not able to recover from an outage for days or weeks highlights how widespread this issue is. Companies from all industries and of all sizes strive to flourish in increasingly data-driven economies. Their IT infrastructures need contemporary scale-out and economically viable data protection systems.

Methodology:

The research study was completed with a total of 709 qualified individuals. All participants had technical or budget-making responsibility for data protection, data management, and storage solutions at a company having 100 to 2,500 employees. The survey was fielded in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, and France.

Choose the Right Data Backup Solution:

As a key IT decision-maker in your company, nobody knows the data requirements of your business better than you do. So, when you’re looking for data recovery and backup solutions to suit your business, ensure to ask the following questions to yourself first. Then, buy accordingly:

How Much Data Does My Company Have?</h3
The first thing you should do is consider the size of your organization and then the potential for data growth. An SMB with just three employees that don’t see much growth in the foreseeable future needs less capacity compared to an SMB having 35 employees facing fast growth in the next few years.

And if you know that your company is growing, consider using backup storage options that actually scale-out. That way, when you set up your data management system you won’t overprovision, and you won’t run the risk of requiring a forklift or underprovisioning upgrade in the future. As your business needs grow, the storage capacity scales.

The best-suited solutions for the organizations that cannot determine how much they might grow in the future are those that harness the power of the cloud. These technologies can also scale-out and grow with your company. You won’t run out of space, and you can pay for what you need.

What’s My Current Business IT Environment?

The business continuity development plan is mission-critical. How will a new recovery and backup solution work with current software and hardware to maintain operations during a disaster? Simplicity begins with an IT eco-system that works seamlessly side-by-side. SO, before you begin shopping around for data backup and recovery technology, first access all the current processes and systems you have in place. It will allow you to gauge the required flexibility of any future solution you’re looking to deploy.

How Much am I Able to Spend?

Big or small, cost-effectiveness is vital for any business, so ensure that you scope out your budget limitations. Additionally, while low pricing for a solution can be very tempting, you get exactly what you pay for. And not just the up-front price, instead, consider the total cost of ownership (TCO). Moreover, your selected solution should be flexible and scalable so that it still works even when your company grows.

Is the Solution User-Friendly?

The simplicity of the solutions is paramount in business. It decreases the opportunity for any errors, saves you time in operation and deployment, and decreases training requirements. After that, identifying a solution that has helpful and reliable 2457 support is vital when it comes to managing the data of your company.

Is the Provider Reputable?

We live and breathe in the age of peer reviews and abundant information. Irrespective of what product/service you are shopping for, you can easily find someone who already tried it and reviewed it online. So, ensure that you check these reviews before you invest in any recovery system. While the experiences of other people with a solution provider may not be exactly in line with your needs, they can point you to critical aspects of a service that you may want to ask detailed questions about. It’s worth the effort to know what exactly you’re getting yourself into before you invest is a solution.

<h2)The Cost and Benefits of Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions:

From fires to floods, hurricanes to hacker attacks, the list of disasters that can befall a business is virtually endless.

That’s why many companies have made disaster planning as one of their top priorities. Their primary goal is to keep the business running smoothly when bad things happen. Being out of commission for any length of time in a competitive marketplace means contract penalties, customer defections, regulatory fines, and lost sales.

When building a disaster recovery plan, one key focus is identifying methods for data recovery and backup. And as more and more data is being stored by organizations, it becomes critically vital that they continually evaluate whether their data protection infrastructure and processes are sufficient for their organization’s needs.

While reviewing recovery and backup solutions, companies need to consider both the total cost of ownership (TCO) relative to the cost of a disaster, and the features that will best serve the business effectively. It is estimated that companies spend up to $50,000 to deal with DDoS attacks and loses more than $100,000 for each ransomware attack due to recovery and downtime costs. Now, do the math.

The first and foremost step for companies is to look at their recovery time objective (RTO). Recovery time objective is the amount of time that is needed to restore systems and applications after a disaster interrupts the businesses. It costs $5,600 per minute for network downtime, as estimated by Gartner. The company then needs to identify its recovery point objective (RPO). The recovery point objective is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. Finally, the problems boil down to how much data you can afford to lose, and for how long.

Ultimately, the following issues should be considered when establishing your data recovery plan;

Initial costs: what software and hardware will be needed to be purchased? Will there be any service upgrade fee? What are the software license or installation costs?

Critical services and applications: How much time it will take to recover data about key vendors or customers? How will the company continue to meet compliance and security obligations? Will the employees in all locations be able to easily access recovered data at the same time?

Data locations: Consider that the data may be on desktop computers, network servers, wireless devices, and laptop computers. What will be the complete cost of recovering all the data, and also the cost of backing up hard copy information and records? What is the best way to extend the useful life of the data protection infrastructure?

Technology inventory: Get a handle on your network diagrams, storage systems and servers, data-center blueprints, and key personnel. What are the third-party services that are currently being used in your company? Will they be able to support the company in a disaster? If yes, then how quickly?

Testing: Who will test the data recovery and backup solution? How often will such a test be performed? What about the training of outside partners? What is the total cost of employee training for these tests? Testing is a vital step that should not be ignored as the costs may be much higher down the road when critical problems are found.

Maintenance: In the long term, what will be the cost of maintaining the solution? How often, and who will do this maintenance? Can the technology advances be blended seamlessly into data protection storage?

Scalability: Growing organizations handle growing and massive volumes of data. The different kinds of varying accessibility and data to users can cause even more challenges when establishing recovery and a backup plan. And the data recovery systems must be able to scale with the company.

Another important note, when looking at data backup and recovery systems, get input from all of your stakeholders within your organization to help you accurately gauge the cost of a disaster to your company, and establish an accurate TCO for a system that will work for your company.

Be Ready Before Disaster Strikes:

From IT outages in both private and public arenas to various cities being held for ransom by cyberattacks, 2019 isn’t showing any great improvements. This is why it’s a smart choice to embrace a strategy that prepares for disaster before it strikes.

On the 3-2-1 backup rule, such a strategy used to be based and is broken like: keep three copies of your data, store two copies on different storage media, and ensure that one of the copies is stored offsite.

However, as technology failures and attacks have increased and the safeguards have improved, the 3-2-1 rule has into the 3-2-2 rule, which means you need to keep three copies of your data, store two backup copies locally on different devices, and send to the cloud and one to the offsite. One another option is the 3-2-3 rule, which is broken down like one production copy with two backup copies, one backup copy is rotational or fixed tape while the other is a disk, and two geographically separated backup copies in the cloud with an offsite copy in something like a storage unit or a car trunk.

TECHtality reports that usually, if the two devices you have that has your local copies attached; they’ll both be affected if the unfortunate should happen. A continuously updated and rotated copy of your data in the cloud that is not in the same geographical location as the other two is vital in protecting your files.

One another reason that the 3-2-3 or 3-2-2 rules provide stronger protection is that, while you may choose to believe that you will never get hit by a natural disaster like a hurricane, you may get hit by the flood, fire, voltage surges, theft or malicious attacks from cybercriminals. It is estimated that about 43% of all cyberattacks are aimed at small companies, and in the majority of the cases, it takes at least six months for a company to just detect a data breach.

Earlier, it used to be that if a company wanted to plan for disaster, it meant devoting resources and time to planning and testing data recovery at an offsite location. However, with the cloud services now providing data protection and security, companies don’t have to devote as much money and time as such services can work easily with onsite infrastructures.

In the current landscape of data outages and threats, it is not a matter of if, but when disaster will hit a company. Whether its cybercriminals wreaking havoc on your data or Mother Nature unleashing a natural disaster, no company can afford to wait until after a problem exist to take necessary action.

Conclusion:
It’s all about peace of mind at the end of the day, not just for the cybersecurity and IT teams but your users as well. So, to truly deliver business continuity and digital transformation, users should be comfortable thinking that their privacy and data are not at any risk when they connect to your services.


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