For many organisations, that moment when disaster strikes and there is a need to invoke the disaster recovery (DR) plan or start restoring from backup is fraught with tension. There are good reasons for that. Surveys show a large number of organisations still don’t test their DR plans frequently enough to trust that they will work when needed. 

Building an effective DR plan has always been a challenge: IT teams have to prove the system is reliable, that it will protect their critical applications and deliver services back to the business in a granular fashion. And all while managing the cost.

SureSkills has launched its Disaster Recovery as a Service offering, to provide customers with a managed service that delivers assurance they can quickly restore critical systems in the event of service disruption.

 
As organisations come to depend more than ever on their IT, and those systems grow in complexity, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to manage a resiliency strategy. The recent BA IT outage and the global WannaCry ransomware infection were stark reminders of how much businesses rely on IT, and the resulting risk when those systems are no longer available.

Such a scenario is becoming increasingly common. According to a business continuity survey by IBM, almost four out of ten organisations have had to execute their disaster recovery plan during the past two years, because of an interruption to their IT service.

In today’s digital business, information is currency. But is your data really protected and delivering value? How can you gain competitive advantage, while ensuring you stay compliant with the onerous upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation?

EU GDPR is sure to dominate conversations about data management, privacy and compliance between now and May 2018, so it wasn’t surprising to see a huge turnout at SureSkills’ seminar last week. 

An audience of more than 100 business and IT leaders, as well as privacy professionals, gathered at the Westbury Hotel in Dublin to hear from experts in technology, data protection and law discuss the likely impact of GDPR. After five snappy presentations, they came away with solid, actionable advice about how to prepare their organisations for the forthcoming regulation. 

Microsoft Ireland’s Head of Legal Rebecca Radloff set the tone for the event by framing GDPR in positive terms. “We very much welcome GDPR. It’s the most robust privacy legislation in the world, and we will be engineering our products to meet these high standards,” she said. 

She urged companies to get working towards GDPR as soon as they can, if they haven’t already done do. Organisations should start by understanding and documenting their current processes for handling data, and then to line that up against the requirements to see where the gaps are.

The widespread disruption caused by heavy flooding in recent years here in Ireland is a constant reminder that not all risk is created equal. Some of it, like adverse weather conditions, is outside of our control. But there are many other elements of risk that an organisation’s management can do something about, and then it becomes a question of what level of risk that business is prepared to tolerate. 

Over the course of the next three blog posts, we’re going to take a closer look at some of the reasons for implementing Commvault data management, under the headings of simplicity, risk reduction and productivity gains.