Kate Mollett, the new Regional Manager for South Africa at Veeam, says changing regulatory requirements necessitate a more considered approach to ensure data is securely maintained, stored and accessed in an increasingly connected environment.
In May this year, we unveiled our vision for the hyper-available enterprise and our strategy to guide enterprise customers on their journey to intelligent data management.
Until recently, the focus has been on establishing an always-on environment and implementing disaster recovery and business continuity solutions capable of delivering on this experience. In this environment, companies realise they can ill afford their mission-critical data to be offline or compromised. Furthermore, changing regulatory requirements necessitate a more considered approach to ensure data is securely maintained, stored and accessed in an increasingly connected environment.
Data that delivers proactive business value
Hyper-availability takes the next step. It reflects the evolving reality of the importance of data in the connected business. With increasing challenges in managing enterprise data, hyper-availability requires that data must evolve from basic backup and recovery solutions, which mechanically copy data at prescribed intervals, to a much higher level of intelligence where data learns to respond instantly and appropriately to what happens anywhere across the enterprise data infrastructure. Data protection and data management must move from reactive insurance policies to a system that provides proactive business value.
It is no longer good enough to occasionally mine data for intelligence and insights or to do so only once a quarter. Instead, the competitive nature of business across industry sectors means data is in a continuous stage of movement. In other words, decision-makers are leveraging insights organically and in real-time as opposed to the more traditional and fixed approach.
In South Africa, organisations across financial services and telecommunications stand to gain immediate benefit from a hyper-availability strategy as they are typically rich in data. The enterprise focused approach of this mean they can extract value out of their data much faster than previously possible and deliver digital innovations to customers to improve their experiences and meet their expectations.
Five stage journey
There are five stages on the journey to intelligent data management for the hyper-available enterprise:
- Stage 1, Backup: Back up all workloads and ensure they are always recoverable in the event of outages, attack, loss or theft
- Stage 2, Aggregation: Ensure protection and availability of data across multi-cloud environments to drive digital services and ensure the aggregated view of service level compliance
- Stage 3, Visibility: Improve management of data across multi-cloud environments with clear, unified visibility and control into usage, performance issues and operations; data management begins to evolve from reactive to proactive, preventing any loss of data availability through advanced monitoring, resource optimisation, capacity planning, and built-in intelligence
- Stage 4, Orchestration: Seamlessly move data to the best location across multi-cloud environments to ensure business continuity, compliance, security and optimal use of resources for business operations. This requires an orchestration engine that enables enterprises to easily and non-disruptively execute, test, and document disaster recovery (DR) plans in a highly-automated fashion
- Stage 5, Automation: Data becomes self-managing by learning to back itself up, migrate to ideal locations based on business needs, secure itself during anomalous activity, and recover instantaneously. This stage brings new levels of automation to enterprise data management via a combination of data analysis, pattern recognition, and machine learning
Customers around the world are leveraging the Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform for Intelligent Data Management to ensure business continuity, reduce risk and accelerate innovation in an era where technologies ranging from IoT, AI, machine learning and blockchain require a platform with scalability and ease of use for managing data.
Local businesses must adapt their data strategies to be cognisant of the need for being hyper-available. Faster time to market, more innovative solutions and catering for an increasingly fickle customer base will help drive the business case towards this. The race is on to becoming a business that is hyper-available. Those who are the first to do so will have the competitive differentiator needed in the months and years to come.
