One of my favorite exercises to help executives with is to separate their business unit leaders into one room and their IT leaders somewhere else nearby. Then, we ask each group a version of the same question:
- Ask the business leaders, “How long can your operations function if the IT systems go offline?”
- Ask the IT leaders, “If the IT systems go offline, how long does it really take to get them running again?”
- Then ask the IT leaders a follow-up question, “When was the last time that we tested and confirmed that?”
If you are like the 1,500 enterprises (over 1,000 users within the organization) that Veeam surveyed earlier this year, then you’ve got a three out of four chance (statistically 73%) of having a gap between how fast that organizations’ business processes need IT to resume functionality and how fast it would actually take. Similarly, 69% of organizations have a similar gap between “How much data can you afford to lose?” and “How often does IT protect your data?”
These are just a few of the statistics found in this year’s Cloud Data Management report that Veeam published a few months ago. In this week’s video blog, I look at some of those statistics, as well as other industry data, to quantify the “reality gap” that most organizations have between their business units’ expectations of IT and IT’s ability to assure delivery.
This is week two in a five-week series, every Tuesday in October:
- Backup is not a destination
- Do you have a ‘reality gap’ in your IT strategy?
- Why downtime is not (just) an IT problem
- Why ‘cloud’ and ‘reliability’ are driving IT changes into 2020
- Which cloud should you use for data protection and why
If I or Veeam can help you, please ping me as @JBuff. Until then, thanks for watching.