Advancing digital transformation and modern data protection

2020 was a year of IT change. Jeremy Wyatt, Operations Director at FCS explains how the last year has affected IT, Digital Transformation and modern data protection strategy

Data protection, now more than ever, is providing peace of mind and ensuring business continuity. The world of data protection is wide and varying, across new technologies and old, striving to support an ever-changing world of technology and the way we work. Many businesses have had to accelerate or postpone their Digital Transformations over the last year with the effect of global influences (such as COVID-19) as well as the usual myriad of IT challenges.

2020 was unique for the world and created a new set of pressure for IT departments. Overnight, centralised IT organisations were catapulted into high-distributed networks, now supporting a highly remote workforce. Budgets were tightened even more, strategic plans were slowed, and unfortunately, rampant ransomware was on the rise. All of these factors have had a knock-on effect to priorities and plans with a recent survey of 3000 unbiased organisations giving the most common reasons that prevented digital transformation.

• Too focused on maintaining operations due to the pandemic (53%).
• Dependencies on legacy systems and technology (51%).
• Lack of IT staff skills on transformation expertise (49%).
• Lack of senior management buy-in (38%).
• Lack of money (36%).
• Lack of time (35%).

What does all of this mean for 2021?

Of the organisations surveyed 91% of them increased their usage of cloud services (31% of those had a significant increase) during 2020. This trend will continue through 2021 with many organisations adding more cloud services and further expanding hybrid setups of on premise and cloud. This shift in working must be considered when examining resources such as data protection, management and compliance.

Modern backups and data protection

With the rapid adoption of modern platforms such as hybrid cloud and SaaS growing (currently growing 15% YoY with Microsoft 365 being one of the most well-known), many organisations continue to struggle with their data protection strategy. Legacy backup cannot succeed with modern applications, stretch across the cloud successfully, or defend against cyberthreats. The goals and focus of those ageing platforms are now becoming a costly risk to many organisations. Organisations need a modern data protection platform to match their evolving data protection needs. Being unified across clouds, hybrid and on-premises, can backup and restore legacy VMs while also protecting cloud-native and container-based applications. All with a solution that can protect and recover from ransomware. Data accessibility can become a strategic asset to the organisation when ransomware strikes.

Data protection challenges

Face it. There is always a gap between our expectations and reality in literally everything we do. And data availability and recovery are not exceptions. IT Management will expect data to be safe and should not be lost under any circumstance and can be recovered without impact. However, in reality, the results and costs can be quite different.

• 80% of all organisations recognise that they have an “Availability Gap” between how fast they can recover applications versus how fast they need applications to be recovered.
• 76% of those same organisations said they have a protection gap between how frequently data is backed up versus how much data they can afford to lose.
• On average 23% of servers had at least one expected outage in the last 12 months. As such the integrity of backups become critical but with an average of 37% of backups failing or having errors, can you really afford the risk.
• In 2020 the average downtime for an outage was 79 minutes with the cost of downtime now averaging $84,650 US per hour. There can be significant financial impact for not being able to recover quickly although it cannot always be classed solely as a cost per hour with reputation, customer confidence, litigation and regulation to mention a few others.

Data protection challenges are on the rise as organisations aggressively adopt modern services and new applications. They are putting pressure on legacy systems and the desire for more comprehensive data protection services. The lesser focus on business continuity in 2020 has made backup and recovery SLAs visible and a greater weight in the organisation’s overall IT health.

Unfortunately, many organisations are still struggling to get legacy backup to continue to work. As systems become more advanced and complex, the pressure on ageing data protection is starting to show. Organisations desire more from their backup than just backup. There is a strong need for standardised data protection for all data across all environments.

Why change backup solutions in 2021

Legacy data protection costs you time and money while putting your data at risk. It is holding you back from unleashing your data and companies’ full potential while ensuring its 100% protection and recovery. Moving to more cloud-based services and SaaS means that your legacy solution can no longer offer the RTOs and RPOs that you require alongside being a reliable solution. Legacy solutions billing methods are usually CapEx but with more cloud services being OpEx, backup solutions need to be equally flexible.

With the rapid change of IT strategy and faster adoption of modern services, data protection is more than ever under pressure to be simple, flexible and reliable to support and grow the business. No longer can backup be enough; organisations are looking for more from their data protection systems. Lower costs, higher automation, and intelligence and data reuse, to name just a few.

With the accelerated adoption of cloud-based services, mainly from the COVID-19 impact, legacy data protection is having a negative effect on organisations’ ability to keep critical data available. As organisations look to modernise their business practices, modern data protection must remain a key component of this plan.

FCS offer services from consultation, managed service, 3rd line support to license only. Please feel free to get in touch for a no obligation chat.

** Source material: Veeam’s 2021 Data Protection Report.

 

Please note: This is a commercial profile

© 2019. This work is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND.