those who engage in the data management best practices touched upon above, the differences are stark. In the zone of bac
Drowning In Data Management Complexity? LOCATE AND ERADICATE KEY ZONES OF IT INEFFICIENCY IT faces a chaotic technology landscape these days. Rampant data growth, the cloud, mobility, Big Data, the Internet of Things and Software-Defined Storage (SDS) are just a few of the drivers of immense change. Managing a growing number of diverse Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in this climate is no small task. According to 451 Research, organizations are experiencing severe pain associated with current methods of backup and recovery due to the explosion of capacity, particularly in Big Data and other huge database environments.1 The key to success is to find a way to lessen complexity, reduce risk and harness IT resources where they can achieve the greatest tactical and strategic gains in productivity. But where should you start? Here are some of the vital areas to address to reach those goals.
1 “Data Protection on the Road to ‘Zero Backup,’” 451 Research, May 2015
SIMPLIFICATION Legacy point solutions have been with us for many years. They worked well in earlier times. But in the age of the cloud, virtualization and mobility, this traditional approach can often lead to having too many disparate systems that make data management a burden. The resulting infrastructure is so complex that storage and IT managers have to spend many hours writing scripts, moving from screen to screen and manually shifting data between storage repositories. This manifests in such ways as having multiple sets of different storage and data management hardware, software and services. And the price tag soon adds up. According to IDC, companies that have allowed their storage infrastructure to grow in this fashion are spending close to 50% more on hardware and software than they need to.2 This tendency towards convoluted data management has other impacts. More than ever, IT is tasked to do a lot more with a lot less. IDC numbers place annual data growth at around 50%. That represents data growing about 7.5 times within a five year period. Yet few storage managers find themselves able to maintain the same number of staff as they had five years ago. In many cases, they have suffered a drop in headcount. IT managers wishing to cope better with this predicament, therefore, should assess their own environments to isolate areas of heavy overhead being devoted to backup, recovery, reporting, archiving, scripting, discovery and other storage management tasks. By simplifying this area of IT, IDC surveys indicate that the volume of work absorbed by these tedious tasks can be slashed by 42%. The number of scripts alone, for example, can be cut by 62%. These numbers become even more impressive as the volume of data being managed rises. While the average organization (defined by IDC as responsible for 46 TB) gains the equivalent of two full-time employees (FTEs) by simplifying their infrastructure, those with a more modest volume of data still gain at least half of an FTE equivalent and those with far more data may see gains as high as 7 FTEs. This allows IT to continue to function despite a huge hike in the amount of capacity being managed, and to focus hiring efforts on areas of high strategic value.
VENDOR SPRAWL Part of the problem is the introduction of too many IT vendors. As mentioned previously, the point-solution mantra resonated with many in IT who had experienced vendor lock-in. This trend was aided by a host of new vendors announcing their arrival on the scene with hot new technologies for virtualization, cloud management, all-flash arrays, Hadoop and Big Data and SDC. But now the pendulum has swung too far to
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2 “The Business Value of Commvault Software IDC 2016 US40773815
IDC: Quantifying the Business Value of Commvault Software: Worldwide Customer Surey Analysisi IDC breaks through the noise and quantifies the concrete value that Commvault solutions produce for customers.
the other extreme. While few are keen to have only one vendor for every IT need, the opposite side of the coin is having so many vendors that it is hard to know who is responsible for what. The average company, these days, finds themselves with multiple ERP systems, databases, CRM, storage arrays, storage management systems and more. The end result of vendor sprawl is a combination of scattered data, the protection of that data split between systems that aren’t integrated and a data management architecture that requires a genius to comprehend. While unification of all systems and data is not necessarily feasible or even desired, it makes sense for IT to evaluate key areas where it may be possible to bring about a reasonable amount of consolidation in order to simplify operations. IDC estimates that it is possible to cut the number of vendors and tools by as much as a third while increasing manageability, reducing the workload and significantly lowering costs. While any one of the improvements suggested above would bring about desirable change in any organization, taken together, they add up to a big reduction in IT spending, a drop in IT overhead and streamlined data management operations that can be overseen by fewer resources. This is supported by data from 451 Research, which found that 35% of IT organizations have realized that they need to redesign their backup and DR infrastructures in the coming year.
LOWERING RISK But saving money is not the only factor in play. While it remains important, the mitigation and reduction of risk have also risen to prominence. Every day, the headlines reveal yet another breach. Thousands of times each day, employees click on malicious links or open infected attachments, exposing the organization to infiltration, espionage, extortion and other criminal activity. In addition, organizations can fall foul of regulatory and audit bodies which detect areas of non-compliance that come with hefty fines and other penalties. Failure to attend appropriately to these areas increases the risk of data breaches, falling out of compliance or audit default by around 75%, per IDC surveys. Risk reduction plays out in other ways. Downtime, for example, is something no organization wants to experience. Yet at least some is inevitable. The goal of IT, therefore, is to cut the amount of downtime to the smallest possible fraction.
“Organizations are experiencing severe pain associated with current methods of backup and recovery due to the explosion of capacity, particularly in Big Data and other huge database environments.” 451 RESEARCH
IT organizations are advised to measure the amount of downtime they are currently experiencing annually and compare this to best practice standards. In most cases, they will find their scores lagging. The way to change this is to establish a more reliable and highly available infrastructure that is more integrated and easier to maintain. Those organizations attaining this goal have experienced a drop in annual downtime by as much as 55%, according to IDC.
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Such an integrated and consolidated infrastructure exerts an impact in many areas, but is most easily and immediately seen in the field of backup. By stripping the complexity out of storage and backup operations, IDC indicates that the number of backup jobs completed within their allotted backup window and without requiring human intervention can be raised by up to 95%. Statistics about backup windows and human intervention requirements, though, only tell half the tale. There are other factors influencing risk, and a vital one is the true extent of protection coverage within the enterprise. One crucial zone for IT to investigate, therefore, is just how much data should be protected versus how much is actually covered. Shockingly, IDC surveys reveal that an average of 55% of data is being backed up in most organizations. Even worse, the volume of data that is being encrypted and reported on is little more than a quarter. The good news is that simplification and consolidation can boost these numbers to 91% for backup coverage, and encryption and reporting to around 65% or more. Yet another aspect of risk exposure is recovery rates. It’s all very well to protect information from disaster or human error. But if you can’t restore data and become operational in a timely manner, the risk to the organization can be severe. If systems are down too long, customers will flee to the competition and income will suffer. Continued too long, the survival of the business is at stake. IDC surveys reveal that the recovery point objective (RPO) of organizations for mission critical applications is 11 hours and 5 minutes on average, and the recovery time objective (RTO) is 12 hours 21 minutes. 451 Research data shows that companies are finding it extremely difficult, and often impossible, to meet their increasingly stringent RTO, RPO and SLA requirements. But when IT is willing to embrace a culture of change and then takes the necessary steps to streamline and simplify its internal structure, RPO can be reduced by around 7 hours and RTO by almost 8 hours, according to IDC. This adds up to email message restores done 83% faster, file restores 87% faster and VM restores 67% faster. The attainment of gains like these has everything to do with minimizing risk and ensuring uninterrupted business operations.
RAISING PRODUCTIVITY Simplifying the infrastructure and reducing risk should always be done with a view to boosting employee and organizational productivity. This
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Your Software: Does the End Justify the Business Value Means?ii Read about how IT’s approach to data management and protection can support and enhance business value.
can be brought about by consolidation of data management resources, provided this is aligned closely with the goals of accelerating recovery, reducing downtime and streamlining of data management. Productivity improvements should manifest in several areas. The first of these is within IT itself. When you compare the average organization to those who engage in the data management best practices touched upon above, the differences are stark. In the zone of backup administration, reporting and troubleshooting alone, there is a difference of almost 17 hours per week. 451 Research surveys discovered that existing approaches to backup and recovery translate into too much time being spent on backup. Backup administration was cited as the number one time drain out of all storage tasks. It is time for organizations to take a hard look at just how much time their staff spends on such tasks and how much inefficiency is baked into existing processes for backup and storage administration. Similarly, cloud provisioning, cloud data management and non-backup related data management represent another 11 hours a week of greater IT efficiency. Now factor in DR, help desk, recovery, legal discovery, snapshots and scripts can account for another 17 hours per week in time savings – but only if IT decides to change its ways and confront the many existing zones of complexity, vendor sprawl and inefficient data management. This will show up in just about every IT administrative function. IT staff should make a careful evaluation of the time they waste in activities such as database testing and development copy creation. By doing so, they may find as many as seven wasted hours per week, according to IDC. A further assessment of functions such as discovery time, DR testing, Exchange/ Oracle/ SharePoint/SQL recovery, VM deployment and VM recovery will show additional areas of time inefficiency. According to IDC, this can mount up to close to 50 more hours per week. In an era where gaining approval to hire another backup or storage administrator is rarely met with approval, seeking ways to recapture those hours can bring a couple of FTE equivalents back into the IT fold by freeing existing staff from ongoing drudgery. The bottom line on IT productivity, per IDC, can be measured in terms of the cost of lost productivity. The analyst firm estimates that the typical organization loses over 7,000 person hours per year compared to an organization that has achieved data management simplification and consolidation. Based on an average salary of $70,000 (U.S. dollars), this amounts to annual savings of $131,705 (U.S. dollars), said IDC, even when 50% of the lost hours are discounted as not every hour is fully lost or unproductive.
“Organizations that establish a more reliable and highly available infrastructure that is more integrated and easier to maintain experience a drop in annual downtime by as much as 55%.” IDC
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SUMMARY Despite valiant efforts on a daily basis by those within IT, they are often shackled by a data management infrastructure that consists of too many disparate systems, a potpourri of vendor solutions and a dispersed and non-integrated collection of backup, storage, DR, archiving and database systems. This plays havoc in terms of hours spent on tedious manual labor, babysitting bottlenecked systems and troubleshooting backup, archiving, recovery and snapshots. It is possible, however, to seek out and eliminate these zones of inefficiency. The attainment of greater IT simplification opens the door to far lower enterprise risk and higher IT productivity. Further this can be achieved while reducing annual spending.
RESOURCES i http://commvau.lt/1SIEAUU ii http://commvau.lt/1OgtC1B
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