When leaders today think about IT projects, they are really considering general business strategies. Any sense of separation between technology improvement and overall operational enhancement has disappeared in recent years as a variety of solutions often including cloud computing have made it nearly impossible to conceive of an effective business operating without ample IT.
“Companies that don’t heed the call to increase their digital disaster readiness may fall behind.”
What does this mean for support technologies such as data protection and offsite backup? Clearly, these offerings are more important than ever due to the overwhelming need for IT performance. A company that loses its servers isn’t just down an important resource – that firm may be completely unable to operate. This new urgency is palpable in the way industry insiders have begun to think, and companies that don’t heed the call to increase their digital disaster readiness may end up falling behind.
Feeling change on the way
In a blog post for The WHIR, IT industry insider Martin Wielomski recently shared the lessons he learned from leading a HostingCon 2015 panel about the current state of the backup industry. He explained that the need for data recovery is popping up everywhere, at businesses of all sizes. These organizations are united by the fact that their existences are now tied closely to whether or not their digital content is safe.
Wielomski noted that gathering data has been a popular strategic tenet for years now, and that it is rendered immediately null and void if that carefully collated content is one serious weather event away from disappearing. Organizations need to learn to compensate for this serious risk by selecting valuable backups. The author added that just about every firm today engages in some kind of data use, even if that’s not the main purpose of the company. Being able to make sense of information and integrate the resulting knowledge into operations are just practices that business today need to embrace.
“There is no possible price break worth the risk of not backing up data.”
According to Wielomski, it was not so long ago that many organizations skipped investing in data protection. He noted that this is no longer possible, and was only enabled by the fact that leaders kept hard copies of the content and were determined to save money. With nearly all vital records now kept in digital forms, there is no possible price break worth the risk of not backing up data. Wielomski pointed out that everything from power loss to simple human error can pose a danger, making it vital that the related content is backed up. While not protecting content was never a best practice, it is now downright unacceptable.
Building a strategy
State Tech contributor Josh Haravay, a Virginia Information Technologies Agency disaster recovery specialist, recently outlined some steps that have to go into organizations’ data protection plans. Developing such a strategy is an important consideration, as being organized and prepared can represent the difference between data recovery and loss.
Haravay specified that organizations must work with advanced and tailored tools to keep their particular resources safe. Working with legacy tech such as magnetic tape can lead to inconvenience or more serious problems. Contemporary systems have emerged in response to outdated methods, and firms shouldn’t be afraid to embrace them.
