The key to maintaining availability for the modern data centre is not whether a business has protected its data by backing up, but how well it can recover from a disruption.
This is according to Mark Perry, sales director at Aptronics, who notes it is imperative that lost data be recovered and restored quickly.
"In the always-on business era, if your restore takes longer than half an hour, you have an unacceptably large availability gap."
According to the Veeam Data Centre Availability Report, IT departments are missing the recovery time objective 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.
The availability gap has immediate costs - it costs enterprises more than $2 million a year in lost revenue, productivity, opportunities and data irretrievably lost through backups failing to recover, says Veeam.
It notes to meet the demands of the always-on business, organisations would need to recover mission-critical data in 60% of the time it takes them now and perform backup five times more often.
Warren Olivier, regional manager for Southern Africa at Veeam, says faster recovery of applications means less downtime and less impact to the business in terms of lost sales or productivity, and allows the business time to test backups.
He says many organisations are unable to meet their service level agreements on recovery time objectives pertaining to how quickly applications can be recovered and what is the most recent data that can be recovered.
According to Olivier, organisations need to modernise their data centre infrastructure with investments in virtualisation, modern storage and cloud, giving them the capabilities they need to recover and restore quickly.
Being able to recover from a failure and avoid data loss is critical and can be considered a competitive advantage, given the severe impact an outage and loss will have on an organisation, says Amanda de Beer, regional manager, data protection solutions at EMC Southern Africa.
She states a well-defined and thought-out backup procedure and policy strategy should be considered a company asset. Often, recovery is only really considered once a breach or loss has already hampered the business.
"Preventing data loss and downtime should not be considered as one would consider insurance, required of course - but not business-enabling."
There are still many organisations facing data loss and downtime regularly - the only way to minimise the likelihood of failure to recover from a breach is if technology, policy and skilled personnel work together.
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