Information access, availability, and protection are fundamental requirements for growing and operating small to mid-size businesses. Managers demand these information management features, while vendors market and sell backup technologies to meet these demands. And turnkey solutions are most critical to smaller firms that are less sophisticated technically, and have less time to worry about managing infrastructure.
Technologies vs Solutions
Purchasing technology carries significant management and maintenance costs, the so the opportunity is to find solutions that satisfy the access and availability demand with minimal complexity. Turnkey means more than plug-in and go back to your customers and your business. It includes service partnership and collaboration to help businesses of this size and technical ability better understand their requirements, including:
- what data is most critical to my business, my customers, my partners
- what are the availability requirements for this data during normal operations, during a disruption to normal business, for analytical and compliance purposes, and for archive?
- where are my data liabilities, how much of my data has no value to my business, and how do I get rid of it
- where can I optimized my operations to improve my long term archiving capabilities but at the same time have critical data available for analytics and recovery purposes?
- how do availability, access, and data protection requirements impact the cost of providing IT to the business, and what are my options?
Cloud Solutions Delivery
Enter the delivery of cloud solutions. For the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, as discussed with the Wikibon community on the Wikibon June 15 Peer Incite meeting, low risk, low complexity data availability were primary goals. In addition to improvements in manageability, efficiency and backup of in their primary environment, a cloud backup solution allowed the museum to move a large portion of our data into a fully managed environment where it could grow and shrink in synch with capacity. In addition, its chosed platform and service provider, Asigra and Corevault provided guidance on policies and procedures based on practical experiences with other customers. This was invaluable to the Museum and lowered the organizations inherent and perceived risks associated with their data and archives, resulting in a more cost effective solution and quicker return on their investment. The key to this success story was allowing the Museum to clearly define their requirements in terms of access and availability of museum records, and work within the budget that had been committed to stakeholders.
Action Item: Technology complexity has no place in the small and mid-size business segment since they can’t afford to manage it. And the backup “workload” does little to drive new business – backup is a bore. Backup vendors must embrace this reality, respect the reputations and business imperatives of customers, and present complete solutions (aka services, partnerships, collaboration) to the access, availability, and data protection requirements of the midsize company marketplace.
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