TRENDING
virtualisation, complemented with
cloud-services, with reliable protection
and rapid recovery as elements of
the design. Only with those elements
accomplished can the organisation
transform its digital strategy to
accomplish its greater goals.
Only 15% are confident in their
current solution’s ability to back-up
and recover virtual machines
Too many organisations continue to
struggle with data recovery in their
efforts to ensure the Availability of
their virtualised systems. Only 15%
of surveyed decision makers are very
confident in their current solution’s
ability to reliably back up and recover
virtual machines within their service
level agreements. That is an appallingly
low percentage of real confidence. Any
organisation that is not very confident
in its ability to protect the foundational
structure of its modern datacentre
should be re-examining its strategy
and the technologies that it depends
on. Consider the fact that respondents
surveyed say they are meeting their
recovery time objectives and recovery
point objectives only 72% of the time.
In more than one out of four attempts,
their recovery effort either fails, takes
too long, or recovers an inadequate
amount of data.
More than one in four servers suffer at
least one unplanned outage each year
Across many enterprises, respondents
acknowledge that their IT teams cannot
recover fast enough and reliably enough.
Veeam refers to these challenges as the
Availability Gap and the Protection Gap.
More than four out of five organisations
surveyed recognise they have an
Availability Gap, and nearly three out
of four organisations recognise they
have a Protection Gap. Decision makers
are acknowledging, for the third year in
a row, that they continue to suffer an
Availability Gap and Protection Gap.
On average, more than one in four (27%)
servers suffer at least one unplanned
outage each year. The median length of
an outage is 23 minutes. It is important
for an organisation to recognise the
18
INTELLIGENTCIO
precariousness of its IT systems and avoid
trivialising downtime when it happens.
Big gap between acceptable
downtime and actual downtime
The disparity between the speed
at which IT can recover workloads
and the Availability expectations of
business units and other end-users is a
concern. The average acceptable data
loss among high-priority applications
is 72 minutes. But, the surveyed
organisations only protect their high-
priority data approximately every 127
minutes, on average.
Similarly, while the average acceptable
data loss among normal applications
is 240 minutes, surveyed organisations
only protect their normal data
approximately every 352 minutes.
This is a quantifiable example of a
Protection Gap. To be clear, most
organisations believe that they have
an Availability Gap, a Protection Gap,
or both. To overcome these gaps, they
must start with increasing the frequency
of protection and boosting the agility
and reliability of recovery.
33% recognise inadequacies in virtual
machine backup and have slowed
virtualisation deployment
It is important to recognise that
inadequate protection and recovery
mechanisms do not just hinder systems
and business processes. They also hinder
an organisation’s ability to modernise
its IT environment as part of evolving
for the sake of business. Virtualised
servers are the foundation upon which
most modern IT infrastructures are
built. Most surveyed respondents
(82%) acknowledge some relationship
between the viability of their backup
solution and the relative success of their
virtualisation deployment strategy. A
non-trivial amount (33%) recognise that
inadequacies in their virtual machine
backup solution have slowed their
organisation’s virtualisation deployment
efforts. On a brighter note, many (49%)
recognise that an effective virtual
machine backup solution has enabled
them to significantly accelerate their
virtualisation deployment strategy. n
Key takeaways
Any organisation that cannot recover
granular data or whole VMs faster
than the established service level
agreements related to acceptable
downtime has an Availability Gap.
Any organisation that does not
protect its data at a frequency
greater than the mean of its service
level agreements related to data
loss has a Protection Gap.
Gaps in either Availability or
Protection hinder virtualisation
strategies, modernising data centres,
and digital transformation initiatives.
Many organisations align neither
their protection frequency nor their
recovery mechanisms with the
established service level agreements
of their business units, resulting in
inadequate Availability.
Many organisations are not able to
effectively quantify the myriad costs
and impacts of downtime or data
loss, hindering the ability to garner
operational support for better
mechanisms and results.
Most IT infrastructures are in a
perpetual state of modernisation,
which includes digital transformation,
virtualisation, hybrid cloud services,
diversification of production,
tightening service level agreements,
all without increases in budget.
Organisations must address the
Availability and Protection Gaps that
they have, or they put their employees
and their institutions at risk.
Organisations should recognise they
have gaps in their Availability and
Protection capabilities, resulting in a
failure to meet the expectations of
their business units
Excerpted from 2017 Veeam
Availability Report by Enterprise
Strategy Group, titled Why
Organisations Still Struggle To
Digitally Transform and Innovate.
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