The 2020 CIO Cloud Data Management initiatives

CIOs have been tasked with many of the same issues for decades. Cost concerns, generating revenue growth, supporting the digital business, and managing cyberthreats, all while navigating skills shortages, have been a way of life for CIOs. And then 2020 presented additional challenges for data centers. Let’s examine in more detail the top CIO priorities, and examine how Veeam can help.

The top CIO concerns

CIOs from companies of all sizes and business endeavors across the world have historically been charged with the same top priorities for many years. These CIO priorities break down in to two types of initiatives: business and technical. This should come as no surprise as the CIO is a business executive, but an executive that is tasked with the proper delivery of IT and data center services in order to achieve business objectives. The CIO’s top four business and technical concerns are:

Business

1. Cost containment and cost optimization
2. Growing the business

Attempting to reduce costs or to optimize costs to the lowest operationally feasible point has been the top CIO concern for at least a decade. But on the other side of reducing monies spent, is supporting business growth for expanded and/or more diversified profits.

Technical

3. Digital Transformation and digital business
4. Security and cyberthreats

As it relates to the data center, if there was a single world to describe the CIO’s top initiative, it would be “digital,” or specifically, supporting the company’s digital business strategy through one or more Digital Transformation initiatives. In the last few years, the other top word to describe the CIO’s focus would have to be “security,” and specifically, the ability to thwart and/or successfully remediate from a cyberthreat.

Veeam is all about the data

Veeam is unapologetically a backup company. To be more specific, Veeam is an availability company that first and foremost provides for backup and recovery, replication and failover, and long-term retention of critical applications and files.

Organizations must ensure that critical data is always available. That backups of all mission-critical workloads are being run with complete success. Not a 95% success rate, but 100% successful because you cannot restore what you have not backed up. Data must be successfully captured on a frequent basis to minimize disruption of services. But for almost two decades, the top complaints about backup have been that the costs are too high, the solutions are too difficult to use, and most alarming, backup success rates remain too low.¹

In the past, it was unclear how data management solutions could help grow the business and support digital endeavors. However, most people recognized that backup could certainly play an active role in remediating against cyberthreats. Only recently were there integrations and advancements where the data management solution can be part of a proactive identification and automated remediation effort.

Veeam can help CIOs with their priorities

Veeam’s Cloud Data Management Platform delivers speed and improvements. It protects critical data at all times, manages data via robust policy-based data services and provides data re-use at scale. Veeam allows you to run the business and to provide affordable, portable backup, replication and long-term retention while you seek to grow and even transform your business.

Run, grow, transform. Data fuels all of this, and leveraging a comprehensive Cloud Data Management solution can provide the availability assurance that data is well protected, while enabling the business to more fully, and more rapidly achieve its economic growth and Digital Transformation plans.

Let’s list again the top CIO priorities and examine how Veeam’s Cloud Data Management Platform can help.

Cost containment and cost optimization

Veeam Universal Licensing (VUL) and the rest of the Veeam licensing options represent the most affordable means for containing cost, allowing for workload portability, eliminating shelf-ware and balancing finances, all while delivering robust, fully-featured Cloud Data Management capabilities to ensure that data is made available.

The ability to deploy Veeam on any infrastructure means that an organization can repurpose existing assets whenever possible, avoiding new expenses. Or if new hardware needs to be purchased, the business can choose the provider that meets their specification and/or that offers the most favorable pricing. The software-defined architecture of Veeam means that as workloads expand, Veeam can horizontally scale out to meet data ingestion and data preservation requirements.

Growing the business, Digital Transformation and digital business

Backup has been the insurance policy that organizations hope they do not have to cash, but at some point, will be required. Enhancements in flash, fast disk, instant recovery of machines and automation now make backup usable for more than an insurance policy; albeit a vitally important insurance policy.

Now backup data can be made instantly available in order to provide fast access for application development, DevOps, data analytics and forensic analysis. The ability to access secondary copies of data without impacting production systems, means that now backup expands from providing availability assurance to being able to deliver business acceleration by allowing projects to move faster and for new Digital Transformation and digital business initiatives to complete sooner.

Security and cyberthreats

Backup has always been the last line of defense against cyberthreats and security concerns. A modern Cloud Data Management solution can proactively alert when suspicious activities, such as longer-than-normal backups and unusually high utilization of resources are detected. Veeam delivers this type of advanced warning but goes further by ensuring that backup data has been automatically tested and verified for accuracy so that you know you can restore effectively.

Veeam Cloud Data Management has powerful automation capabilities to move data to a secure, immutable location so that it cannot be accidentally or maliciously compromised. If a threat is detected, Veeam’s DataLabs Secure Restore can leverage your preferred anti-virus solution to sanitize compromised data and only restore it into production once the data has been cleansed.

Veeam supports Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is going to be critical for most, if not all, CIO and businesses to meet their 2020 goals. Veeam completed a global 1,500+ enterprise organization survey in late January and found that most organizations (84%) have challenges in meeting their Digital Transformation goals, and that only 16% felt that nothing was gating their Digital Transformation activities.

Staff skills and expertise, dependencies on legacy systems and technology, lack of money and lack of time where the top four inhibitors to a company’s Digital Transformation progress. Veeam can help overcome each of these via a platform that is easy to use, offers modern capabilities such as data portability, cloud mobility and data re-use, and is licensed in a fair, highly-portable manner, with easy-to-use wizards and automation that saves time.

Veeam may be an availability solution at its core, but in reality, the Veeam Cloud Data Management Platform is about ensuring data is readily available while allowing for far more agile and accelerated business operations. Better backup is included in the list of benefits, but better backup combined with Cloud Data Management for data portability, cloud mobility and data re-use is where a backup product becomes a Digital Transformation enabler.

¹ _{From the Veeam 2020 Data Protection Trends.}