Addressing the disconnect between business need and IT ability
In preparation for the Truth in Backup event in London next week, our MD Peter Groucutt spoke with Truth in IT's Dave Littman about a common challenge faced by many organisations today: aligning the needs of a business with the ability of their IT department.
Even now, with cloud adoption rates at an all-time high, we are still seeing a significant level of uncertainty from organisations of all sizes. Even some the more technologically advanced companies we work with have concerns about proving the value of their disaster recovery (DR) systems to the rest of the organisation.
This usually boils down to the issue of testing. In order to get the backing from your management team, you need to prove a systems worth to the business as a whole. But as the size of an organisation grows, so does the complexity of testing – both for the failover and the fail back to live systems. There never seems to be a good time to test - what if something goes wrong? – and so it becomes an operational problem.
The number of moving parts involved in a full system failover is so complex that it becomes unrealistic to carry out. It's uncommon for us to talk to an organisation that has ever tested their entire system for the fear that they'll experience complications that can't be fixed by Monday morning. Our message is that this is exactly why cloud-based DR is such a compelling proposition– because it's so easy to failover into a temporary environment, configured as though it was a real situation. It doesn't matter if you run in to complications because your live environment remains unaffected.
Ultimately, the point of testing is to identify the weak spots in your system so that in the event of an actual disaster you can feel safe in the knowledge that your data is safe. Rather than testing the entire system at once, test individual, more manageable components.
We all know the pressure on the IT team to justify every spending decision – testing your systems will prove the value of disaster recovery as part of the organisations overall business continuity plan.
Listen to the full interview with Peter and Dave here.