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Mind the Gap: Strategies to Evolve to become an Always-On Enterprise

Digital economy is disrupting the traditional technology and business landscape. With modern enterprise no longer operating within the confines of their own “four walls”, it is critical to address challenges and tap new opportunities.

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Rajkumar Maurya
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By: Gregg Petersen – Regional Director, MEA and SAARC Veeam Software

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Digital economy is disrupting the traditional technology and business landscape. This dramatic change is forcing CXOs to embark on the digital transformation journey. With modern enterprises no longer operating within the confines of their own “four walls”, it is critical to address challenges and tap new opportunities.  The reality that 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 available 24/7/365, this makes nearly all systems critical to business operations and hence downtime is no longer an option.  Every hour of downtime will significantly impact brand reputation, revenue, customer loyalty, and employee productivity.

Gregg Petersen –  Regional Director, MEA and SAARC Veeam Software Gregg Petersen –

Regional Director, MEA and SAARC

Veeam Software

Modern enterprises are software-driven businesses, bringing a host of new technologies that needs to be managed differently in data centres.  At the edge,there will be mobile devices and at the core, hardware comprising servers, storage, and network equipment that make the data centre ecosystem more complex, will be present.This will force IT departments to deliver business continuity strategy that ensuresAlways-On Availability.  Due to such complexities, enterprises are facing an annual increase of unplanned downtime events resulting in the great amount of time to recover, also leading to loss of productivity and revenue. According to a 2016 Veeam Availability Report, this “availability gap” costs enterprises up to $16 million annually in lost revenue, impacts negatively on customer confidence and brand integrity.

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To achieve and maintain a high level of availability, CIOs must have a clear understanding of the factors affecting business continuity.  Today’s modern enterprise thrives on big data, mobility, and social platforms, and CIOs should recognize that legacy systems are no longer capable of managing the new business requirements needed to make their organizations ‘Always-On Enterprises’. In order to deliver availability, enterprises should be equipped with high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance and complete visibility solutions. 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

Modern 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 with 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.

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The Availability Gap

The implications of downtime are far-reaching, both internally and often externally, affecting customers brand experience.In addition, the gap between business expectations and the IT department’s ability to meet expectation is widening.  This is due in part to the mismatched business expectations for technology capabilities while the company is 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 employ a hybrid mix.

 

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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 recover in real-time and simplify services restoration.As a result, a cloud is being touted as a critical part of achieving one’s availability goals.

Technology management is critical to accelerating digital business, and it is intolerant to legacy IT practices. CIOs need to have a clear view of their business-critical portfolio in order 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.  Enterprises adopting ‘Availability’ as their key focus will hold the edge to adapt to market changes and stay competitive.

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