Lessons in ROI

As advertised, we held a free webinar this past week entitled Understanding the ROI of Backup 2.0: Building a Business Case. While we had a great crowd joining us, we know that some of you weren’t able to attend, so we’ve made a recording of the session available online for you to view at your convenience.

We started with a quick presentation of the factors that need to be considered when calculating ROI – not just the cost of technology itself, but the cost within your organization of downtime and lost data, and what your organization would consider “acceptable loss”. We were also joined by Brooks Betts from Lincoln County Healthcare, who shared his own experiences developing a business case.

One of the most interesting points, though, came when we asked just a few simple questions. Shockingly, we found that 40% – four out of 10 attendees – had experienced a server failure in the last 90 days. Additionally, more than half were unhappy with their current backup and recovery solution. That’s a pretty scarry place to be. Statistics would suggest that over the course of the rest of the year, nearly everyone in attendence would experience a server failure. Yet more than half don’t feel that they’re adequately protected. That’s as powerful a piece of information as you can have when working to justify a better approach to data and application protection!

So be sure to catch the recording of Understanding the ROI of Backup 2.0: Building a Business Case. And feel free to join us on Thursday, March 18th, for our next free webinar: Advanced Backup and Disaster Recovery Best Practices in the Healthcare Industry.

Industry News

Funding your IT disaster recovery program
Disaster recovery costs and business continuity activities extend beyond simply agreeing to a business continuity plan/policy and initial funding. Management support must include development of the infrastructure that supports the policy, ongoing maintenance of the overall program and ongoing provision of resources (financial and human).

CTOs Need a Checklist for Preparedness
Each year, CTOs get more responsibilities added to their plates, with the recent trend being to add the overall business continuity to the disaster preparedness work already piling up. Once one ventures beyond data and into true organizational risk management, there are numerous challenges to face.

Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
One of the great ironies of storage technology is the inverse relationship between efficiency and security: Adding performance or reducing storage requirements almost always results in reducing the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system.

Clearing the fog from cloud
People are making the cloud computing and storage much more complicated than it has to be. There are 2 key elements in cloud infrastructure: scalability and manageability. Those are the hard problems. If you don’t have those you CAN’T have a cloud.

The Types Of Automated Tiering
Automated tiering, the transparent movement of data between tiers of storage, has several methods of delivery. There is some disagreement as to which is the “real” automated tiering. Understanding the types of automated tiering will help you select the best method for your data center.

News from AppAssure

Free Webinar: Advanced Backup and Disaster Recovery Best Practices in the Healthcare Industry
Please join me on Thursday, March 18, 2010 for a complimentary webinar discussing new approaches to protecting applications and data in the healthcare industry. Discover how a Backup 2.0 approach can help eliminate backup windows, reduce recovery times to just minutes, and minimize data loss within healthcare organizations.

Case Study: University of Maryland
Academic departments at the University of Maryland rely on systems administration teams to deliver all IT services including e-mail. System Analyst Carlos Luceno and his team watch over the e-mail system used by electrical engineering, physics, and chemistry department faculty and staff. Not only was his backup system difficult to use in normal situations, it offered no disaster recovery help at all. That was keeping Luceno up at night.