Tomorrow's Connectivity Today

Connectivity is driving a revolution in the way that companies address their IT needs. Gone are the days when businesses could operate from 8:00a.m. to 5:00p.m. and still be successful. In today’s hyper competitive environment, the biggest challenge for businesses in the Middle East lies in becoming an Always-On Business, one that must operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. IT spend is growing with the market expected to peak in 2016, influenced by factors such as government investments for smart city projects, growing connected device usage, and increased corporate investments in software and IT bolstering. But are companies investing their money in the right solutions that offer availability and scalability for the continued change we anticipate in the future?

To keep pace with the rapidly evolving IT world, companies must provide services that are faster, more secure, better controlled, and have lower operational costs while increasing business agility. Data centers are being modernized in order to accommodate these requirements, by implementing server virtualization, modern storage applications, and cloud-based services—but these represent only one aspect of what businesses must consider when updating their IT capabilities.

While the above-mentioned implementations are good at building scale, regional organizations must take into account the demands end users will have. These can include requiring round-the-clock access to data and applications, and the need for services to be 100 percent reliable, without any downtime or the risk of data loss. On top of this is the fact that data is growing rapidly, at a rate of 30 to 50 percent per year. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, global mobile data traffic reached 2.5 exabytes per month at the end of 2014, up from 1.5 exabytes per month at the end of 2013. To put that into perspective, last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly 30 times the size of the entire global internet in 2000.

To cope with these demands, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) need to upgrade their storage systems to minimize downtime and guarantee access to data as and when it’s required, in order to evolve into Always-On Businesses. Critical to this business transformation is making the switch from legacy backup to modern availability solutions.

While legacy backup systems may have been perfectly capable of handling the demands of the past two decades or so, they are simply not designed to cope with the increasing pressures of today’s highly-connected world. Legacy systems’ incapability can lead to numerous service issues, such as lengthy recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), meaning substantial delays in usability, with the potential to negatively impact business productivity. There is also the significant threat of not being able to detect issues before they affect the system; less than 6 percent of backups are tested each quarter, more than 16 percent fail to recover, and 59 percent of patches or upgrades result in more downtime than expected. All of these aspects have the potential to disrupt employee workflow. Eighty-two percent of CIOs say that there is a gap between the level of availability that legacy backup solutions provide, and the level that end users demand.

The Always-On Business cannot afford the setbacks that legacy systems are prone to, which is why the modern data center has evolved to deliver a highly capable, reliable solution. Availability requirements offer recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes, with a zero percent failure rate, testing on every upgrade and patch, and proactive visibility to ensure the highest level of protection for all data and users.

At a time when connectivity is critical and security even more so, companies cannot afford to rely on their old systems and hope for the best. Today’s demands will only increase tomorrow, and there’s no time like the present to make the switch to a more robust solution. 

About the Author: Gregg Petersen is Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC, Veeam Software.