When It Comes to Data, Planning Is Everything

A recent article in PC Magazine reported that according to the National Archives & Records Administration, 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 or more days due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. And 60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within six months of the disaster.

So how can your storage strategy play a key role in keeping you safe? Developing and maintaining a relevant and manageable contingency plan for recovering enterprise information is not a nice-to-have aspect of a storage strategy—it’s a must-have requirement for ensuring the ongoing continuity of your business.

Planning is everything, and proactively developing a worst-case contingency plan is essential for protecting enterprise information assets and ensuring ongoing business operations. Disaster recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) should be integral to IT’s strategic planning process, and developing and documenting a reasonable course of action is essential.

Fortunately, advancements in technologies like cloud services, mobile devices, and virtualization provide the enterprise with flexible tools and choices to support satisfactory emergency response policies and procedures.

Meanwhile, IT is often getting hard sells from storage and cloud vendors for DR solutions that could potentially lock the enterprise into rigid, long-term DR/BC solutions that are costly and inflexible. There are many capable and affordable solutions out there, but some may be overkill for most companies, and some of the DR/BC sales strategies appear to be designed to sell by spreading fear.

The first step is to calmly work with management to assess your DR/BC requirements. Spend the time needed to realistically assess the types of disaster scenarios you need to plan for so that you develop a realistic DR/BC strategy that can be cost-effectively implemented.

While building DR/BC capabilities, you can also eliminate bottlenecks by modernizing your existing storage by implementing a storage refresh. Modern technologies like hybrid-flash, all-flash arrays and cloud storage integration now present IT with attractive options to effectively address demands to increase storage capacity, improve performance and reduce the cost per gigabyte. For more information on modernizing your storage, view this brief podcast.