Article by Nigel Tozer, Solutions Marketing Director EMEA, Commvault
The ‘noise’ generated by today’s IT more damaging than you think. I’m not talking datacentre racks, fans and cooling here, I’m talking about the sheer amount of data that software and management systems throw at you these days, and importantly the actions that are driven by that information. One critical area where noise can be distracting is ensuring your business is ‘recovery ready’ – important due to the clear and present threats posed by malware, good old-fashioned system failures, domino effects and natural disasters.
This was brought into sharp relief by a recent article that quoted figures from an IDC survey which said that more than 90 percent of organisations have experienced some type of significant tech disruption in the last two years. Scarier still, 20% of those surveyed said a tech-related business disruption caused significant damage to their company’s reputation and a permanent loss of customers.
So, what is the noise that’s causing the problem? For many organisations, it’s the old favourites: troubleshooting, performance monitoring and tweaking, report generation and servicing demands that quite frankly, should be self-service. It doesn’t sound overly menacing does it? While this is happening though, your modernisation is slowing, recovery SLAs are slipping away from you and Disaster Recovery (DR) plans aren’t being updated, tested or improved. Complexity is your enemy here too, because it amplifies the potential for noise.
It’s clear then, that we all need to be reminded occasionally about the importance of time management, and the internet is full of wisdom on this topic. Personally, I like the ‘stones and sand in a jar’ analogy as it does a really good job of reminding you where your focus should be. The story has a jar, which when filled with sand, no longer has the space for the big, important stuff, represented by large stones. If you put the stones in first, you have room for some pebbles (still important but less critical stuff) and the sand (noise) then fills the gaps.
The good news is that help is here, in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI has the power to take away the need to spend large amounts of time on those grains of sand by automatically taking care of them. What’s really cool is that when AI learns about the sand, it also shrinks down the size of the stones, so the important stuff is less problematic than it used to be. The really great news is that AI has already been applied to recovery readiness and DR by Commvault.
Imagine AI’s impact for recoverability and DR in your organisation:
• AI smarts set against your SLA needs provide traffic-light reports and alerts, based on intelligence from backup user data gathered from across the globe
• If the traffic-light report isn’t all green, AI can rejig backup schedules, collection methods and configs to reset the report to green to meet your recovery/DR needs
• When this can’t be done because infrastructure is the issue, AI will flag it
• AI based anomaly detection reports a large number of files being changed because it was out of the ordinary based on normal activity (laptops or servers – doesn’t matter)
• Retention schedules for backups are lengthened automatically until investigated, just in case the file changes are related to ransomware or malware
When you add AI to simple, role-based self-service for key IT roles and even your IT consumers, together with powerful automation, your business is in a much better position to deal with the noise that’s hurting your ability to recover from an outage or disaster. And with IDC putting the chances of some sort of tech disruption at 90% over two years, that’s got to be a good thing.
If you’d like to become ‘recovery ready’ and modernise your DR systems, either in your own datacentres or by leveraging the cloud, talk to us at Pav IT today.
