For enterprises the question is no longer, “Are we backed up?” The question is now, “Are we always available?” It’s not enough to just back up the data anymore. That’s why Veeam has declared March 30 as World Availability Day.
World Availability Day will draw attention to the need for enterprise data center availability. Can IT guarantee that customers, partners and employees will have access to their applications and data 24-7? Does IT operate a data center that is Always-On? If an application goes down, can IT bring it back up in 15 minutes?
For consumers, just backing up data is sufficient, and reminding them to do so is a good thing. Family photos, tax documents, email – a hard drive crash or a spilled cup of coffee can cause a lot of heartache if nothing has been backed up. If it takes a few hours or even a couple of days to get the data back, that’s not a huge problem.
But it’s a completely different story for today’s global enterprises. Employees, customers and partners expect to have access to the information and applications at any time and from anywhere.
Unfortunately, that’s not happening: 84% of CIOs admit that they are unable to meet that expectation according to a recent industry survey commissioned by Veeam Software, and it’s costing them up to $16 million every year! In fact, they’re not even meeting their own service level agreements (SLAs). SLAs for recovery time objectives (RTOs) average 1,6 hours, but respondents admit that in reality recoveries take an average of three hours. Similarly, the average SLA for recovery point objectives (RPOs) is 2,9 hours, whereas 4,2 hours is actually being delivered, on average.
No employee or customer will accept being without access to a critical application for even a few hours. It’s good that a backup exists, but if someone has to retrieve the tape from the depths of a warehouse across town before a restore can even begin, the problem is far from solved.
In fact, downtime is increasing. In 2015, organizations experienced an average of 15 unplanned downtime events per year, compared to an average of 13 events in 2014. In addition, the average length of downtime events has increased, with IT decision-makers (ITDMs) reporting that unplanned mission-critical application downtime length has grown from 1,4 hours to 1,9 hours. Non-mission-critical application downtime length has also increased from four hours to 5,8 hours.
But beyond the simple frustration that employees, partners and customers may experience, the current situation is expensive. Downtime and lost data cost the average business as much as $16-million annually, which is up 60% over 2014.
Businesses don’t need backup – they need availability. But until very recently, 24-7 availability was out of reach for all data and applications. Today, however, the combination of advancements like storage snapshots, virtualisation and other technologies have made it both feasible and affordable for all enterprise organizations to back up as often as every 15 minutes and recover anything in the same amount of time.
Veeam believes that World Availability Day will let businesses know that true availability is now finally within reach.
