Veeam Marks March 30 as World Availability Day…Because Backup is No Longer Enough

For enterprises the question is no longer, “Are we backed up?” The question is now, “Are we always available?” It’s not enough to just back up the data anymore. That’s why Veeam^® Software has declared March 30 as World Availability Day.

WHAT: World Availability Day will draw attention to the need for enterprise data center availability. Can IT guarantee that customers, partners and employees will have access to their applications and data 24/7? Does IT operate a data center that is Always-On? If an application goes down, can IT bring it back up in 15 minutes?  World Availability Day will reinforce the need for Availability for Modern Data Center™ that can deliver the Always-On Business™, an environment that modern businesses require.

 WHY: For consumers, just backing up data is sufficient, and reminding them to do so is a good thing. Family photos, tax documents, email – a hard drive crash or a spilled cup of coffee can cause a lot of heartache if nothing has been backed up. If it takes a few hours or even a couple of days to get the data back, that’s not a huge problem.

But it’s a completely different story for today’s global enterprises. Employees, customers and partners expect to have access to the data center anytime. Unfortunately, that’s not happening. 82 percent of CIOs admit that they are unable to meet that expectation according to a recent industry survey commissioned by Veeam. This may also explain why 81 percent of enterprises are currently involved in data center modernization to meet the increasing demands for 24/7 access to IT services and applications, and to enable an Always-On Business.

Why? For starters, it takes IT an average of 2.9 hours to recover a mission critical application, and 8.5 hours to recover other applications. No employee or customer will accept being without access to a critical application for even a few hours. It’s good that a backup exists, but if someone has to retrieve the tape from the depths of a warehouse across town before a restore can even begin, the problem is far from solved.

Especially if the backup itself won’t restore. CIOs say that when disaster strikes and they need to restore data, they find that 1 in 6 backups fail, on average, which isn’t surprising, since organizations only test about five percent of their backups each quarter to ensure they’re not corrupted. But beyond the simple frustration that employees, partners and customers may experience, the current situation is expensive. Downtime and lost data cost the average business as much as $10 million annually! Businesses don’t need backup. They need availability. But until very recently, 24/7 availability was out of reach for all but the biggest enterprises.

Today, however, the combination of advancements like storage snapshots, virtualization and other technologies have made it both feasible and affordable for all enterprise organizations to back up as often as every 15 minutes and recover anything in the same amount of time.

World Availability Day will let businesses know that true availability is now finally within reach.

WHO: Veeam^® Software, the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Modern Data Center, is the fastest growing data protection company in the world, with more than 135,000 customers. The trick is, though, Veeam doesn’t do plain backup anymore. Veeam provides availability. Its promotion of World Availability Day is part of its larger mission to enable IT to provide a 24/7 data center that is Always-On.

WHEN: March 30, 2015.