Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 21 | Page 17

TRENDING To better understand Availability challenges, Veeam commissioned the Enterprise Strategy Group to survey more than 1,000 business professionals and senior decision makers for the sixth annual Veeam Availability report. This includes respondents from UAE and Saudi Arabia. The research study reveals that organisations across the globe continue to struggle with Availability assurance within their IT environments. By Arun Shankar. T he unfortunate reality is that too many business- accelerating and digital transformation initiatives are being hindered by inadequacies in IT system Availability. Because teams are burdened with keeping existing systems running, they are not able to move systems and architecture forward to help their organisations evolve. The first and most crucial step in ensuring viability of IT systems providing service to business units and customers is to accept that there is an Availability Gap. Too many organisations lack accurate metrics or monitoring processes and presume their systems are sufficient. Instead, presume there is a problem and then quantify it. Next, quantify the business unit’s service level agreements and assess the protection mechanisms and recovery capabilities. Only by comparing your Availability and protection expectations with real-world capabilities will you be able to determine the size of the gaps in the strategy. Convert gaps into impact analysis by simply asking, if a system were to fail, what would that cost? By looking at past system logs, most will discover that systems have had interruptions in the past, which can now be quantified as business impact. Organisations must address the Availability and Protection Gaps that they have, or they put their employees and their institutions at risk. With an accurate understanding of the frequency and duration of outages within the environment, compared with the service level agreement expectations of your constituents, and an assessment of the economic and perception impacts on an organisation, it is possible to reimagine what it would take to become an Always-On Enterprise. Moving forward, reducing downtime and data loss will require decision makers to acknowledge that downtime and data loss have costs, so doing nothing will cost more than any solution. Meanwhile, technical decision makers will need to reimagine that Availability and protection really are attainable. This is possible, if you first stop using legacy approaches and embrace an IT strategy that is underpinned by agile www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 17