For many organizations, 2020 has proven to be either a confirmation of the importance of business resilience, or an eye-opener as to the potential risks. Organizations that have transformed IT with modern data protection solutions, resilient infrastructure and reduced IT complexity have been in a much stronger position to deal with the challenges posed in today’s environment, including the shift to remote work caused by COVID-19.
What are key factors in modernizing IT for business resilience? Here are some of the critical ones that have taken on even more relevance today:
- Hybrid cloud: By using a combination of private cloud with public cloud, IT teams can choose the path that works best for each workload, taking advantage of cloud economics and elastic scalability along with data center efficiencies, performance, control and centralized management. With a consistent hybrid cloud platform that extends from the data center to the edge to the cloud, IT can use consistent policies and security protections across all environments, mitigating risk of poorly performing applications or uncontrolled shadow IT initiatives.
- Reduced complexity: Complexity is the enemy of business continuity. If IT teams are spending too much time on manual processes; or if they can’t quickly identify causes of downtime; or if they cannot meet companywide goals for recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives – then the impact on the business can be substantial. The key is to leverage modern management and data protection platforms that feature automated protection, centralized policy management and enforcement, plus consistent, familiar tools and technologies that maximize recovery and accelerate operational efficiencies.
- Seamless integration: There are significant benefits in working with trusted partners and proven solutions, particularly in modernizing backup, recovery and data protection. With a skills shortage in many IT functions, IT leaders need to take advantage of existing personnel and skill sets. There is also huge value in protecting existing investments, reducing both capital expenditures and operating expenses. In particular, the tightly integrated partnership between Dell and VMware means that IT teams can be assured that their solutions are future-ready and flexible when responding to changing requirements dictated by planned initiatives such as digital transformation, or unplanned events such as COVID-19.
Success Stories in Business Resilience
Rushmore Electric Power Cooperative’s old backup solution left 50% of their data unprotected and exceeded their 13-hour backup window, sometimes by days. In addition, to keep vital electrical grid and load-monitoring systems available, they needed point in time delivery. By modernizing with VMware and the Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance, the utility has been able to achieve the following results:
- Reduce the nightly backup window from more than two days to six hours.
- Replicate mission-critical systems for any-point-in-time recovery.
- Reduce daily admin time from three hours to 30 minutes or less.
- Back up about twice as much data in the same amount of storage space.
USC Australia is one of Australia’s top-rated universities for teaching quality and overall user experience. To scale with its growth, the university sought to modernize backup, recovery and data protection with a solution that would work naturally with their VMware environment and could be used for future cloud projects. The modernization effort included upgrades with Dell EMC PowerProtect appliances and PowerProtect Data Manager. Key benefits have been management simplicity, ease of administration and automation as well as much faster backup and restore times. The university now completes VM restores in less than 10 minutes, has a 100% success rate for restores and a deduplication rate of 96%.
The Miami Dolphins use their infrastructure as the backbone for every customer engagement, ticket scan and purchase, as well as the delivery of online media assets and the stadium’s A/V systems. The organization needed a modern solution for backup, recovery and data protection, upgrading to a combination of VMware with Dell VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure, Dell EMC Data Domain and Dell EMC Isilon storage. With Data Domain, data is recorded across multiple devices, so if a hardware failure occurs there is no data loss. The organization’s recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives are now less than 20 minutes for all services.
Taking the next step
Integration, simplicity, hybrid cloud and IT modernization are all critical to achieving IT’s end goal: Establishing a resilient infrastructure that can adapt and recover when needed; allows for reduced business risk, and is reliable, secure and future-ready.
Please visit Dell Technologies to learn more about how your organization can take the next step in modernizing data protection, recovery and backup to achieve transformational business resiliency.
