World Availability Day is Wednesday, March 30. If you are wondering what that means for you, it means A LOT. This is especially true since World Backup Day (formerly held on March 31) is no longer relevant. Enterprise organizations are now aware that the right question is “Are we AVAILABLE?” and not, “Are we backed up?” Traditional backup is swiftly being replaced by an all-encompassing category called Availability.
Industry today is all about constant innovation, which has had a huge impact on how mankind creates and delivers products and services. Industry‘s digital transformation is fueled by what IDC refers to as the third platform (among mobile, social and cloud platforms). This transformation is having a profound effect on every single industry.
Availability plays a significant role for all organizations, regardless of industry or size. Enterprise organizations now rely on 24/7/365, and Availability is officially a necessary survival tool. Modern users today expect unfettered access to ALL applications and data, from streaming media, to CRM tools, and much more. When user expectations are not met, the ramifications are often costly and time-consuming, and they are likely to keep everyone, from the IT pro to the CEO, up all night.
A cruise ship is a great analogy. A cruise ship is a floating, 24-hour entertainment and food operation that’s like a small city designed to provide seamless customer experiences. All cruise ships today are software-defined, including cabin access, onboard shopping, entertainment streamed to thousands of rooms and devices, surveillance and security networks, dining room electronic-booking systems, fitness classes, excursions and complex engine and navigating systems.
Guess what happens if all, or even just a few, of a cruise ship‘s software-defined systems, go offline? Think about it. BANG goes the seamless customer experience, together with Availability, brand confidence and the very reputation of the cruise line itself!
A cruise ship is the quintessential Always-On Enterprise. It’s passengers and employees all need access to software-defined systems 24/7/365. People on the ship NEED Availability, not backup. Because each ship only has a few workers onboard to run the entire IT infrastructure, big cruise companies like Norwegian Cruise Line and Viking Line use Veeam. Thanks to Veeam, their data centers are fully virtualized, available and Always-On.
Every organization is just like a cruise ship, from Fortune 500 brands to small independent startups. They all embrace digital transformation and they all demand Availability. A new market has been created, and Veeam is this new market.
Today, 84% of senior executives admit that they have not solved their Availability challenges. They are in the up-all-night category I mentioned previously. Global organizations freely admit in a recent Veeam survey that downtime results in the loss of customer confidence (68%) and damage to their organization’s brand (62%). This proves that downtime has a clear and lasting impact on organizations, which extends beyond the data center and results in an even wider negative financial impact. In the same survey, around half of respondents indicate that downtime results in the loss of employee confidence, which demonstrates that the negative impact is also felt internally, with potential employee morale and performance implications.
Based on my cruise ship analogy and the feedback from global executives in our survey, it’s clear that World Backup Day is dead and World Availability Day is here to stay.
Rest assured that Veeam will continue its mission to enable Availability for the Always-On Enterprise. Use social media and hashtags #WorldAvailabilityDay and/or #WAD to tell the world if YOUR organization has successfully achieved Availability. Your customers and employees will be happy to know you’ve joined the World Availability Day celebration on their behalf!