When your phone starts ringing at 3:00 A.M., waking you up from a dream of living on a beach and driving a red sports car, it’s about time you start wondering how well your environment is protected and backed up. As your European counterparts start their day only to find out they can’t login to their mission-critical application, it becomes your problem to fix.
Investing in your datacenter is a worthwhile use of time and money. Not only can you unlock new capabilities that are leaner, faster, and more reliable, but you can also reduce the downtime associated with on-premise deployments. With management continuing to focus on recovery time objectives (RTO), because time really is money when your environment is offline, investments in data center stability should not only include hardware replacements, but software redundancies as well.
As Rick Vanover notes in the March edition of VeeamUp, “For technology leaders, the time between issues being identified and resolved is already creating tension. But when Availability is viewed as an extension of the service levels that are part of the normal state of the data center, the right investments can be made based on a complete, holistic view of all business requirements.”
Gartner believes that IT spending in the data center and for IT services will rise 2.1% in 2016 compared to 2015, which means that even though it seems like every company is moving toward the cloud, the adoption rate is much slower than the headlines lead you to believe. With companies continuing to invest more dollars locally into their own deployments, a well-rounded spending approach is critical to making sure you have excellent performance and recovery capabilities too.
Seeing as downtime is the easiest way to bring a company of any size to a screeching halt, any dollar spent in recovery and the prevention of an outage is an easy expense to justify. As we all chase the dream of a 24x7x365 availability, we need to find new and innovative ways to make the RTO as small as possible.