Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 08 | Page 69

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Enterprise Security Ensuring an always- on business during the holiday season W ith the vacation season approaching in the Middle East, employees in the region are looking to either fly back to their home countries or to holiday destinations with cooler climes. This does not mean, however, that expectations of continuous access to applications, services and data should be lowered. In fact, times when staff resources are low illustrate the importance of the data centre and availability, as any sign of downtime could have a damaging impact on revenue and repeat custom. An always-on enterprise relies on delivering 24/7 availability, regardless of holidays, but what happens if a critical system breaks down when the IT team has gone away? It will take longer than usual to get systems running again, and will in turn impact corporate revenue and reputation. www.intelligentcio.com Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC at Veeam Software says that for business continuity to avoid downtime, there are three simple precautions enterprises should implement to ensure that corporate applications, services and data remain available even if their employees are on holiday. Avoid downtime It is no longer the case that planned or unplanned downtime will not have a direct impact on vital services, whether it is revenue or reputation. According to latest 2016 Veeam Availability Report, organisations experience unplanned downtime. This downtime occurs more than once a month on average, costing organisations up to $16 million annually in lost revenue (not to mention the decreased productivity and missed opportunities). At a time when it is expected that products and services should be available at all times, both unplanned and planned downtime are deemed unacceptable, especially since it is now easily avoidable. Companies that experience their systems crashing run the risk of losing profit and productivity. A modern business requires constant and reliable data availability – especially during the popular holiday periods when staff levels are significantly lower yet expectations are the same, maybe even more. Clean garbage data before the holidays Garbage data is a recognised problem, and one that can have the biggest impact on a firm’s availability. Before employees log off for long periods it is valuable to clean up old data. Failure to do this can eat up resources in INTELLIGENTCIO 69