Elly Yates-Roberts |
Digital transformation has turned into a business strategy must-have, as it will be necessary for growth into the next decade and beyond. In fact, four out of five IT professionals consider digital transformation a necessity for the survival of a business, according to the 2019 Digital Transformation Market Trends Report by software company Masergy.
Many enterprises have undertaken a move to the cloud to harness big data and artificial intelligence to accelerate innovation and drive efficiency and growth as part of their digital-first strategies, but new findings suggest IT resilience strategies lacking comprehensive data protection capabilities threaten cloud and digital transformation initiatives, as data is so central to their success.
For digital businesses, IT resilience is defined as the ability to protect data during planned and unplanned disruptive events, while maintaining accelerated data-oriented business initiatives. From a technology perspective, IT resilience encompasses disaster recovery and back-up tools, advanced analytics and security capabilities that keep data continuously available and protected.
Organisations that want to mature their IT resilience strategy should take a few simple steps to further build the case internally, assess gaps and anticipate future challenges.
A good first step is to get business and IT decision-makers to agree on the importance of data availability. With more dependence on service providers outside of traditional IT, decision-makers need to understand that responsibility for the availability of data and applications is spread among multiple parties and will need a solid, coordinated data availability plan during disruptions.
Firms should also pinpoint cloud-based protection and disaster recovery tools that may be absent or underused within the organisation, as these solutions will resonate most from cost, ease of use, and functionality perspectives.
Educating employees is another crucial part of pursuing the ideal IT resilience strategy as it can help enterprises address growing data management complexity challenges. These include the emergence of non-traditional data types that require innovative back-up and recovery methodologies; meeting compliance regulations like the General Data Protection and the markets in financial instruments directive II; and expanding cloud and multi-cloud storage environments.
Over time organisations can improve their IT resilience positions with education, understanding and implementation of the right technologies. The most optimal IT resilience strategies will be able to coordinate people, processes, and technologies to eliminate data loss, while delivering data availability that supports the organisation’s digital transformation initiatives today and in the future.
Avi Raichel is the chief information officer at Zerto
This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.