A modernized data protection strategy enables customers to more efficiently transform their IT – delivering benefits all round.
In the fourth of a series of blogs inspired by influential research published by industry analyst ESG, we learn how modern data protection strategies, tools and processes enable and support IT Transformation.
Modernizing the IT environment is a fundamental step that companies of all sizes must take on their journey towards achieving IT Transformation – and that includes the implementation of modern data protection devices and processes.
Around the world, data continues to grow at a phenomenal pace. There’s an equally rapidly expanding need for mobility and the intrinsic value of data to business is also increasing. So optimum protection is paramount.
As your customers and prospects make the necessary move to modernize their IT environments – and specifically data center technologies – they need to ensure that their data protection strategies, tools and processes also evolve accordingly.
What does a modern data protection approach involve?
In today’s increasingly digitally driven economy, the typical workloads, service levels and consumption models that organizations have to provide vary widely. So a ‘one size fits all’ data protection strategy is unlikely to be appropriate. Instead, a suitably modern and agile data protection solution should be deployed to meet the unique needs of each environment that it protects.
This should include everything from backup and availability to archiving solutions, all of which should be validated against specific workload requirements and the ways they are run or accessed – whether that’s from on-premises physical and virtual environments, via hybrid and public cloud services or endpoint devices.
The impact of modern data protection on IT maturity
A comprehensive data protection strategy is essential to support effective IT Transformation. It has also been shown to play a key role in the ranking of an organization’s IT maturity.
Earlier this year, ESG conducted a survey of 4,000 IT executives from private- and public-sector organizations across 16 countries to evaluate their progress in embracing IT Transformation1 – and rank them as ‘Legacy’, ‘Emerging’, ‘Evolving’ or ‘Transformed’.
In general, organizations that had achieved ‘Transformed’ status were nearly 10X more likely than ‘Legacy’ organizations to have invested in modern data protection solutions to cover a broad range of environments – ranging from cloud to on-premises to endpoints.
The 88% versus 9% response is clearly a stark difference – and those businesses that have made the move to modernize their data protection strategies as well as their IT environments are also benefiting from other significant operational advantages.
Flexible data protection strategies to fit specific needs
In its Research Insights Brief on how modern data protection strategies support and enable IT Transformation2, ESG reports that 85% of ‘Transformed’ IT organizations have at least three unique data protection mechanisms in place to safeguard assets and data – covering the spectrum from archive software to continuous availability technology. In contrast, more than half of ‘Legacy’ organizations have no more than two data protection technologies implemented.
This is partly due to the fact that ‘Transformed’ organizations already have a greater diversity of workloads and the consequent need to protect a broader range of IT environments.
However, these organizations have also embraced self-service data protection. This enables line-of-business owners and application administrators to manage data protection tasks like setting backup policies and recovering data themselves. Empowering users with these tools has the potential to minimize delays between the creation and protection of data and enable faster recovery of data, among other benefits – because it reduces or even eliminates the dependence on IT to provision resources or resolve issues.
The ESG study found that two-thirds of ‘Transformed’ organizations reported extensive availability of self-service data protection capabilities.
Significant operational and wider business benefits
Overall, the ESG research found that modern data protection strategies, tools and processes delivered significant operational and wider business benefits.
Compared with ‘Legacy’ organizations, the ‘Transformed’ organizations in the study:
◈ Were 13X more likely to offer well-established self-service for data protection management.
◈ Were nearly 2X more likely to have exceeded their revenue goals in 2017.
◈ Were able to recover their VMs 31% faster.
◈ Were 14% more likely to hit their recovery targets.
◈ Were 8X more likely to believe they are in a very strong competitive position.
Do you still have customers and prospects in the ‘Legacy’ camp? They clearly need to start to consider what they’re going to do to catch up and remain competitive…
Read and share the full ESG Research Insights Brief >>
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