There are six kinds of resilience. Not every vendor checks every box; your strategy still has to. Here’s how I look at the Data Protection landscape: it starts with backup and IT-DR and ends where the business needs it to … Trust in IT.
video transcript
When I talk to IT leaders and resilience stakeholders on what they’re trying to solve for and then try to map that against the myriad buzzwords and solution capabilities that vendors and providers offer, here’s how I look at the data protection landscape.
Everything starts with a BACKUP and the assured ability to restore. Don’t minimize that because nothing to the right of that is achievable unless you can adequately protect it and recover the data across your heterogeneous environment, from servers to services and all the endpoints and data sources in between.
IT DISASTER RECOVERY is fairly well understood as a goal, but IT-DR solutions differentiate in agility and scale. For most, orchestration is the real hero, with bonus points for being able to transform how the data was originally accessed versus where it lives during or after recovery (on-prem to cloud, VM from one hypervisor to another).
From there let’s talk about the difference between DATA RESILIENCE and INFRASTRUCTURE RESILIENCE because that’s the difference between “Can you rebuild the house or just replace the furniture?” And those challenges are present across the data center … OT, edges, and ROBO … and certainly in cloud-hosted infrastructure.
Now we get into the problems of the day:
- Seems like only a year or two ago we were just talking about CYBER RESILIENCE, where encryption and exfiltration were our highest threats.
- But as we rely more and more on centralized IDENTITY platforms, ensuring their validity is paramount. These technically aren’t entirely separate issues either: it’s much more efficient for a bad actor to bring down your identity platforms (so that you can’t access your production resources) than it is for them to find a way to breach and damage all the resources themselves.
- And now with AI being mainstream, you have to worry about the officially authorized digital version of you making mistakes 10,000 times faster than you can.
Not every vendor/provider is going to check all of these boxes, but your IT strategy needs to have answers that follow a line that starts with backup and hopscotches across this board. Because until you can make it all the way across, you don’t have BUSINESS RESILIENCE … or business continuity … or, simply ‘Trust in IT‘ that the business demands and deserves.
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