Across all industries, firms around the globe fear one common enemy: data loss. This super villain attacks organizations without warning through unexpected failures and outages, causing IT professionals to live in constant fear of the loss of their firm’s data.
The scourge of data loss can attack from many angles, with the only guarantee being the element of surprise. This dread keeps IT professionals up at night, causing nightmares of administration errors or environmental catastrophes leading to the loss of data and potentially the loss of their job. Taking a quick look back at the some of the major natural disasters of 2015 reminds us that these nightmares do sometimes become reality. Last year devastating earthquakes and typhoons plagued Asia, while the US faced major wildfires and flooding. No matter where your data center is located, the threat of data loss is always looming from a natural disaster. And now with headlines building up our anxieties over malicious acts, it makes sense that business leaders feel an immense desire to ensure that their firm’s mission critical data is well protected.
Data loss is a villain that might not have an evil lair or a maniacal laugh, but instead is a very serious and real threat. In a recent global survey, 32% of organizations reported having suffered data loss and lose an average of 2.3 TB of data per year. Perhaps even more terrifying, 71% of organizations reported not being very confident that they could fully recover if something unexpected disrupted operations in their data center. Consider the total value of all of this data that is at risk due to the lack of a solid recovery strategy. These organizations may be out of luck when data loss comes to threaten their mission critical data.
So what can you do to build confidence in your ability to defeat data loss in the face of unexpected disaster? Here are a few tips:
- Deploy a complete data protection solution that does not leave any gaps. Data Protection is not one size fits all. By implementing a solution that spans the continuum of data protection from continuous availability to archiving depending on your business needs, your valuable data can be maintained and downtime can be minimized even during the worst disaster.
- Develop a succinct disaster communication plan in advance to ensure that all key players will be notified and can respond immediately, as the hours just after a disaster hits the data center can be the most essential. This plan must include the data center staff and also the key-decision makers outside of the IT department that you will need buy-in from.
- Make sure that you have a strong alliance behind you. When firms do not partner with a trusted data protection vendor, they may find themselves on their own when disaster strikes. And according to the latest global survey, only 24% of organizations that leveraged a single vendor for their end-to-end data protection solution experienced data loss, as opposed to 38% of organizations that used multiple vendors. The right vendor will have an expert professional team to help you through the worst disasters in addition to the industry’s leading technologies guarding your data.
Thankfully, there is an all-star team of heroes who are trusted around the globe to protect firms from the evils of data loss that you can ally with. This now classic lineup often faces impossible odds when challenging the threat of lost data, but together these heroes provide enterprises with the best protection across backup, recovery, archiving and availability. I am of course describing the EMC Data Protection lineup, which stands up to the threat of data loss and protects data wherever it lives, whatever happens.
The EMC Data Protection lineup are the heroes that IT professionals deserve and need right now—do not delay in preparing your firm from data loss’s next attack. Be on the look out for the continuing adventures of the EMC Data Protection heroes on the Data Domain EMC Community Network over 2016. There we will cover new tales of EMC’s data protection lineup and expert professionals saving the day when disasters strike. To get started, here is a recent story of Data Domain saving the day when a data center suffered a major fire.
