GEC NEWS WIREApplication Downtime Costing Enterprises in UAE $5.5 Million Each Year – 2016 Veeam Availability Report
With freshly brewed coffee making rounds and a box of baked muffins at the center of the roundtable, Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC actually explained how Backup for Veeam is as tranquil as a sip of coffee and how vital it is for organizations, as a morning breakfast is for your health. The breakfast roundtable hosted at the Veeam office took the regional media houses on a virtual global tour of Availability Gaps and unplanned downtime costs and explained how they have been actually costing enterprises a lot more than just, money.
A new research from Veeam Software, that attempted to understand the CIOs and IT Heads perception of the Availability Gap, clearly illustrated that despite numerous high-profile incidents in the last year, global enterprises are still not paying enough attention to the needs of their users. In its fifth year, Veeam Availability Report 2016 showed that 84 percent, a two percent increase on 2014, of senior IT decisions-makers (ITDMs) across the globe admit to suffering an ‘Availability Gap’ (the gap between what IT can deliver and what users demand). This costs businesses up to $16 million a year in lost revenue and productivity, in addition to the negative impact on customer confidence and brand integrity. UAE enterprises were surveyed as part of the global report and the corresponding cost of application downtime for UAE businesses is US$ 5.5 million a year.
Enterprises are also increasingly suffering from the costs of untouched files sitting on the data center. So what exactly should one do with these data? What should an ideal backup do with this data? Greg puts it across beautifully- “We actually take this data and do something beautiful with it. At Veeam, you can take all the backup data and boot it up. You can take hundreds of services and run it in the backup… something we call as the Sandboxing”.
Ratmir Timashev, CEO at Veeam. “Modern enterprises are becoming software-driven businesses, so IT departments can no longer get away with services that are ‘ok’; always-on availability is paramount. However, since our last study, the number of annual unplanned downtime events have increased (from 13 to 15) and they are also lasting longer and taking a far greater amount of time to recover. In today’s economy, where speed and reliability are imperative, this is unacceptable. If this trend continues, I fear for the companies we surveyed.”
Gregg says, “There is an urgent need for organizations in this region to plug the availability gap. It is a good sign that nine in ten organizations in UAE intend to change or augment their current backup and disaster recovery solution, with the average timeframe for this change being 5 months. It is not always easy to divert precious funds to invest on infrastructure, but there is acceptance that this needs to bedone. We are seeing enterprises starting to realize the importance of availability solutions and, in particular, the role cloud and cloud-based services such as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can play. Enterprises appreciate the need for an Always-On, always-available operation and I am confident that users will see this become a reality sooner rather than later.”
