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you are protected and moving workloads around. That’s a comfort
for CIOs looking to start something with a predictable cost. It means
you can grow and shrink as you need to.
Are enterprises in the Middle East feeling more
comfortable about the use of cloud?
If you have a look at the big players AWS is putting up bricks and
mortar in Bahrain, Microsoft is putting up bricks and mortar in
Abu Dhabi. I think with the feel that the data resides within the
borders, within the GCC, within the Middle East, is going to be a big
enabler. The interest and the comfort is there. People are having the
discussions, people are testing it, people are moving those workloads
into those environments. I think within the next two to three years
you will see a massive growth in this area.
Do we tend to forget about the impact
of outages having an effect on factors such
as staff morale, customer loyalty and
business reputation?
The challenge here, the damage to business reputation, is not
measurable from day one.
But over time consumers will exercise their options and it might be
over one week, or one month. I know specifically in South Africa the
big banks have had quite a few outages and I know customers won’t
move their assets or money over night but they make a conscious
www.intelligentcio.com
FEATURE: DATA MANAGEMENT
decision to say ‘this level of availability is not acceptable I’m going
to move’. So the damage to the brand is measureable over time.
For organisations that have an outage, the first thing I would
do is I would reach out to every single customer and offer them
something of comfort. In the digital age it is very easy to forget
that you’re not just dealing with an application on somebody’s
phone. At the end of that there is a human being, who has got an
opinion and feelings and too often in the data world we tend to
think we operate with applications but at the end of everything is
a human being. We tend to forget that but it’s very important in
terms of brand reputation and keeping that consistent.
You get those customers who are quite vocal about it. In the Middle
East people aren’t very vocal about it because it’s not the done thing
but generally on social media around the world they are very vocal
and they will move quite quickly.
Is it true that data availability strategies may
seem adequate until they are tested and fail?
With Veeam we look at your DR plan, or your orchestration plan, and
we automate that for you. We scan and look in your environment
and we help you build a plan that you can test every single day, every
single week in a semi-live environment. We simulate failures and the
software then builds your DR plan for you and you know that when
you present that plan to auditors it was tested last week and you can
feel quite comfortable that if you have an outage there is a way you
can recover quite quickly. n
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