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Nine steps to making your business technologically resilient

No question anymore that staying competitive means engaging your organization in a digital transformation involving the replacement/modernization of legacy systems and an expanded ability to exploit ever-increasing volumes of data.

Unquestionably, the technologies at the heart of digital transformation — implementations of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures that support greater deployment of mobile devices and include IoT (Internet of Things) as well as AI-based analytics, commerce and collaboration platforms, dev/ops, and much more — are mission-critical.

But none of these technologies or the innovative business models they support can help your bottom line when they’re disrupted. And they’re disrupted a lot: 91% of those queried in one recent study experienced tech-related business downtime during the past two years.

So how can you sustain both digital transformation and business resilience?

Veeam Data Protection Trends

The answer, of course, will be unique to your business, but I offer you these nine starters:

    1. Make sure you’ve asked and answered basic business continuity planning questions, including…
      • What are the greatest risks/vulnerabilities our organization faces — including supply chain exposures?
      • What steps have we taken to respond to these risks and sustain/recover our most important operations in timely fashion? What else do we need to do — e.g., train employees about social media hygiene?
      • How do our digital infrastructure and technologies currently enable us to sustain/recover key operations? How should we improve this — e.g., by always making cybersecurity a primary consideration?
      • What’s the best way to systematically roll out needed changes?
      • How should our digital infrastructure and technologies be updated over time to adapt to our evolving needs?

 

    1. Deploy tools that integrate data protection and cybersecurity;

 

    1. Deploy tools that support unified management of all data sources — this means on-premises data centers as well as all public cloud services data, etc.);

 

    1. Use cloud-based services that integrate data backup/protection and disaster recovery;

 

    1. Don’t forget to protect your as-a-service applications with cloud-based backup;

 

    1. Regularly test your organization’s ability to recover your backed-up data;

 

    1. Move beyond event logs to root cause analysis tools that can be used to investigate, diagnose, and resolve operational issues in near real time;

 

    1. Feed historical and performance data into analytical engines that can generate proactive recommendations — e.g., how policy should be configured so a particular workload achieves its recovery point and recovery time objectives; and

 

  1. Consider engaging a managed services provider with the right mix of experience, a technical reach that spans the full lifecycle of your resilience needs, and the ability to both customize their services to fit your requirements and deliver fast, knowledgeable support.
Meet the Author
Tim Burke is the President and CEO of Quest. He has been at the helm for over 30 years.
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