Looking back, it’s clear that 2016 highlighted the importance of Availability. As we start a new year, increasing customer and partner demands have caused Availability to continue to gain momentum. Over the last 12 months, massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks brought many services to their knees, interrupting business operations and harming reputations for some of the world’s biggest brands. Moving into 2017, data centers will take center stage and dominate IT, as businesses look to harness information and provide tailored services for customers and partners. Availability will soon become a requirement, and not just “nice to have” for businesses looking to succeed and meet customer demands. Customers will no longer tolerate downtime in the coming year. Bottom line? The time has come for every business to be available 24.7.365.
In 2017, Veeam will continue to help businesses deliver on the public’s expectation for on-demand access to accurate information and critical services. Businesses now realize that they must embrace customer expectations and ensure the seamless delivery of services. Veeam has been solely focused on Availability since its inception, and is now well positioned to address the following four trends that modern enterprises are now facing:
- The blurring lines between public, private and hybrid clouds — A few years ago, extending data center infrastructure to a hyper-public cloud felt like a futile endeavor that involved connectivity issues, security problems and a mix of other unpleasant surprises. Today, the market is ready to accept adoption of hybrid-cloud architectures, from both infrastructure and application sides. This is happening now, with greater mainstream adoption predicted as enterprises look to enhance operational agility and reliability and ensure that data and applications are available at any time and from anywhere
- The explosion of the software-defined infrastructure — It’s no secret that the software-defined data center has been a huge trend in recent years. This is thanks, in part, to virtualization’s popularity. Running applications in a virtualized environment offers many advantages, such as increased efficiency, more reliability and more flexible IT infrastructures to ease management, free time and resource issues. As businesses continue to evolve, expect to see more demands on vendors for software and services that meet expectations of the next generation of innovators.
- Staying one step ahead of hackers — Threats from hacking and the proliferation of botnets and malware (specifically, ransomware) will continue to keep IT managers up at night throughout 2017. We’ve seen enormous burdens placed on organizations as they tried to maintain Availability during 2016, including large DNS services attacks causing company services to be unreachable during critical times. As more businesses look to provide digital services, hackers will continue to nip at their heels. More than ever, companies will need to place additional emphasis on end-to-end data security, backup and recovery to ensure that their services will remain reliable for partners and customers.
- More data, more possibilities — The data center of today AND tomorrow will increasingly hold more historical and mission-critical data. This data deluge will continue in 2017 due to an influx of inputs from the Internet of Things, more complex business systems and growing amounts of existing data sets. On the positive side, increased data will bring benefits to businesses wanting to leverage advanced analytics to hone existing operations and provide new services to customers. In 2017, businesses will start to gain more insight from collected data and better shape decisions and inform business strategies. These analytic capabilities will only bear fruit, however, if data is both available and robust. For businesses relying on advanced analytics to drive operations, downtime will not only halt their ability to transact with customers and suppliers, but also hinder informed decision making. Businesses today now need to direct their attention to maintaining Availability of mission-critical systems that underpin their analytics.
Today’s technology landscape offers endless possibilities for organizations to provide exceptional services based on information, which is housed and delivered by data centers. The expectation that data be available whenever and wherever it now a requirement. Gone are the days when downtime was considered a normal part of doing business. In 2017, the data center will take center stage and serve as a critical infrastructure player for both storing information and providing services to customers, employees and partners. Success to meet or exceed expectations in 2017 will depend on having a solid plan to ensure that Availability is a vital part of maintaining business operations.