After what feels like an eternity, businesses are beginning to see glimpses of normalcy again. It hasn’t been easy, and most people’s “normal” probably looks different now, but we all learned a lot from the events of 2020 that we can carry forward.
One of the key lessons we’ve learned is that many organizations don’t have an effective business continuity plan in place. The global health crisis put some companies in positions they never imagined they would be in, which exposed severe gaps in their continuity strategies.
Looking ahead, organizations must prepare for a broad range of threats — even those that seem unlikely. Although things are looking up, the global business environment is still volatile, so it is critical to plan accordingly.
Business Continuity Is More Crucial Than Ever
Business continuity plans almost always include how to respond to disruptions such as ransomware attacks or fires. However, before the pandemic, many plans didn’t include contingencies for such things as switching operations to 100% virtual practically overnight.
New Threats
After the wake-up call they received in 2020, IT teams are broadening their scope of what constitutes a risk and updating their business continuity plans to accommodate these new threats.
For example, data itself presents a type of risk in today’s business environment because of how rapidly it is being generated.
Globally, data storage needs are projected to exceed 200 zettabytes by 2025, and all of that data needs to be stored, managed, processed, and distributed. Supply chain disruption and a skilled labor shortage affect the rate of data center construction, which may result in inadequate capacity and latency issues.
Remote work is likely to continue, at least to some extent, which also complicates business continuity efforts. As IT teams discovered early in the pandemic, securing, supporting, and managing a highly distributed workforce that often relies on un-inventoried personal computing devices and home Wi-Fi networks is problematic, to put it mildly.
Targeted and Unexpected Threats
Not only do these additional remote endpoints make planning for continuity complex, but they also increase the organization’s attack surface. There has never been a shortage of cyberthreats, but COVID-19 opened the floodgates for phishing scams and ransomware attacks, specifically targeting remote workers and critical infrastructure providers, such as healthcare organizations.
Phishing and ransomware are fairly typical threats, but there are also increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather events to consider, such as the ice storm that knocked out power for a wide swath of Texas. IT teams have a lot of new and unusual contingencies to incorporate into their business continuity plans.
Costs and Consequences
The purpose of a business continuity plan is to ensure critical business operations are restored to an operational level quickly after an outage or disaster. But if you have failed to plan for the particular crisis at hand or your business continuity plan is otherwise ineffective, your systems may encounter an extended period of downtime.
Downtime comes at a high cost to businesses in both direct and indirect ways. The most direct impact is the revenue the business loses while the system is inaccessible. Internal operations also come to a screeching halt during an outage, leaving employees unproductive and not contributing to meeting business goals.
Extended downtime also causes less quantifiable financial losses that are no less impactful on the business’s bottom line. Today’s users demand 100% system availability from the services and applications they use. If you offer anything less, you risk losing customers to your competitor.
Those same users are also rabidly protective of their data, so any hint of a security event or data breach can impact your company’s reputation and standing in the market. Reputational damage is nearly impossible to quantify, but you will certainly see the effect on your year-end revenue report.
How Arcserve and StorageCraft Ensure Business Continuity
The recent merger of Arcserve and StorageCraft solves the growing market need for a single source of solutions that can address every business continuity challenge organizations struggle with today.
According to Arcserve CEO Tom Signorello, "Until now, there was no single company able to provide a solution portfolio to solve all customer data protection and business continuity needs with simplicity, agility, affordability, and scale. The new Arcserve just changed the game. We have a clear and compelling vision for our future—one that will bring much-needed business continuity, an exciting future roadmap, and certainty for our customers.”
Here are five benefits of the Arcserve and StorageCraft merger that can help you create a rock-solid business continuity strategy that will support your operational requirements today and facilitate your organization’s growth in the future.
1. Combined Forces
Arcserve and StorageCraft’s combined product portfolio ushers in a new era of data management and protection. The days of ad hoc data protection and security are over. The merger created a new kind of organization: a single source for all of your current needs with the scalability and flexibility to evolve with your organization as your requirements and infrastructure change.
The single-vendor model provides simplicity, agility, and cost-effectiveness across your organization. And, because combining Arcserve’s and StorageCraft’s industry experience and their extensive IP puts us at the forefront of data protection, we can start solving tomorrow’s business continuity challenges today.
2. Holistic Approach
Today’s businesses struggle to keep up with explosive data growth, complexity, and risk. The newly expanded Arcserve and StorageCraft can help you simplify and take control of your operations with a holistic approach to managing your full ecosystem.
Truly holistic protection involves multi-layer cybersecurity, highly secure backup, and well-tested disaster recovery. Arcserve and StorageCraft check all the boxes with immutable storage, hybrid and converged data management, cloud-native BaaS/DRaaS, and multi-cloud and SaaS protection.
3. Single, Agile Ecosystem
Disparate systems and platforms have become the norm, but they significantly add to your organization’s threat management challenges, complexity, and lack of visibility. Arcserve and StorageCraft’s combined solutions manage and protect data workloads in all environments, including remote office/branch office (ROBO).
With ROBO environments quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception in some markets, the Arcserve and StorageCraft merger means you now have the flexibility to match varying business requirements (e.g., on-premises, remote replication, and cloud) with the appropriate solution.
4. Data Protection and Disaster Recovery
When a cyberattack, a natural disaster, or human error impacts business operations, you shouldn’t have to wonder if your data will survive.
Arcserve’s data protection solutions manage and protect critical data and business systems. At the same time, StorageCraft’s cloud backup and recovery services are built for complete, reliable, and streamlined business continuity — and now you can manage it all through a single pane of glass.
5. Fast-Track Innovation
The Arcserve/StorageCraft merger created a data protection powerhouse. Their fast-track innovation path provides rapid, seamless evolution to next-generation data infrastructures and workloads, including containers, next-generation cloud data centers, and hyperconverged, multi-cloud, and edge infrastructures.
In today’s unpredictable business environment, planning for continuity can feel like trying to aim at a moving target. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, your organization’s survival could depend on how well you design and implement your business continuity strategy.
Don’t leave it to chance. Download “Smart Strategies for Business Continuity” to learn how to create a predictable, sustainable, and reliable business continuity plan so your organization can quickly overcome and prevent downtime and data loss.
