Chief information officers (CIOs) are now under pressure to meet increased availability requirements of the modern data centre.
So said Warren Olivier, regional manager at Veeam Software, during the Data Centres: The Next Frontier 2015 conference, at The Forum in Bryanston yesterday.
He was referring to the Veeam Data Centre Availability Report 2014, which discovered that enterprises cannot meet the requirements of an "always-on" business with application failure occurring more than once per month.
According to the report, 82% of CIOs said they cannot meet their business' needs. More than 90% of CIOs are under pressure to both recover data faster, reducing the financial impact of unplanned downtime, and also back up data more often, reducing the risk of data loss.
This availability gap has immediate costs: application failure costs enterprises more than $2 million a year in lost revenue, productivity, opportunities and data irretrievably lost through backups failing to recover, says Veeam Software.
It found unplanned application downtime occurs more than once per month (13 times per year); and unplanned application downtime costs an organisation between $1.4 million and $2.3 million annually in lost revenue, decreased productivity and missed opportunities.
Olivier believes even planned downtime is unacceptable to the modern day consumers who want to transact anywhere and anytime.
As an example, he pointed to the recent MWeb virtual machines outage which resulted in the ISP's customers losing data without recourse.
He believes this situation could have been prevented had the company put adequate backup measures in place.
Olivier pointed out 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.
Even more troubling, he added, they are missing the required recovery point objective - how often data is backed up - by 1.5 hours, and they are a staggering 4.5 hours away from modern always-on standards.
To keep pace, Olivier pointed out 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."
Share