In a fast-moving, ever-changing business environment, being always-on has become critical for virtually every organisation. But always-on means different things to different verticals, says Veeam Software SA.
Warren Olivier, country manager for Veeam SA, says businesses across the gamut of industry verticals depend on the high availability of mission critical systems and data to remain operational and compliant, and retain customers. "In the digital age, businesses can't afford downtime on Web sites, enterprise systems or operational equipment. Nor can they afford to lose important transactional or customer data."
Businesses across the gamut of industry verticals depend on the high availability of mission-critical systems and data to remain operational and compliant, and retain customers, says Warren Olivier, country manager for Veeam South Africa. "In the digital age, businesses can't afford downtime on Web sites, enterprise systems or operational equipment. Nor can they afford to lose important transactional or customer data."
However, the availability demands and priorities of each vertical are different, Olivier points out, so the solutions and benchmarks for availability and compliance are varied too. "Simply put, there is no one size fits all when it comes to availability. For some, recovery time objective (RTO) - how long it takes to boot up systems - is most important. For others, recovery point objective (RPO) - what data point you can get back to - is more important. Veeam combines these in the concept 'recovery time point objective' (RTPO), and considers under 15 minutes a benchmark RTPO for practically every organisation."
In the financial sector, particularly in banking and trading, only minutes of downtime can result in major financial losses, Olivier points out. Any loss or corruption of trading information or customer transaction information is a serious matter. "In the financial sector, time is money and the protection of data is of paramount importance. In this fast-moving environment, businesses should be striving to achieve systems recovery from downtime in five minutes, and an RTPO of well below fifteen minutes. Naturally, achieving this comes at a cost, but the potential losses due to systems failure or data loss could far outweigh these costs."
In the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors, the ability to securely store and retrieve data might be a slightly higher priority than the ability to recover all systems in five minutes, says Olivier. In this sector, medical and patient records must be available to healthcare professionals as quickly as possible, because patient lives may depend on it. Medical equipment, admission and authorisation systems, hospital intranets and medical facility connectivity cannot fail, so an RTPO of no longer than 15 minutes is necessary, he says. Olivier notes that always-on connectivity and systems availability will become increasingly important for the healthcare sector in years to come, as remote diagnostics and remote medical procedures come increasingly into use. "Because of the sensitivity and importance of the data being stored, security and encryption are also crucial in this environment," he says.
The priorities are somewhat different in the online media and e-commerce space, where any downtime on customer-facing servers can translate into a dramatic loss of sales or readers. "In these verticals, recovery time must be the priority, and stress testing must be carried out to ensure that the sites don't fall over due to high traffic," he says. Data protection tiering is important in the case of e-commerce sites, to ensure that systems managing online payments recover quickly and that any data relating to these transactions is not lost. In these environments, an RTPO of 15 minutes might be adequate, although they might strive for a faster recovery time."
In contrast, the mining and manufacturing sectors would not rank their online presence as their top recovery priority. In these sectors, systems that enable production are the most critical and cannot be allowed to fail. "In the mining sector, our customers tell us that one of the most important systems is, surprisingly, the time and attendance system," says Olivier. "While this might be a relatively simple system, without it, workers cannot be tracked, with serious implications for payroll and health and safety. Therefore, without the time and attendance system, production cannot take place." In manufacturing, time and attendance and manufacturing equipment are the key focus, he says. "If the automated assembly equipment fails, production does not take place and money is lost." In these sectors, an RPTO of over 15 minutes is acceptable in many departments, says Olivier, although the financial, procurement and orders divisions will nonetheless need complete data recovery and data protection.
"These different priorities in different verticals illustrate the point that ensuring availability solutions meet the unique needs of each organisation depends on a clear understanding of the business's strategies, risk profile and customer expectations," says Olivier.
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