“This annual event focuses on addressing the challenges of availability in the modern enterprise. This year was no different. With insights from several top global Veeam executives, delegates had the opportunity to engage and share experiences around the impact that the shift towards the always on enterprise has had on their business,” says Claude Schuck, regional manager for Africa at Veeam.
Veeam’s Doug Hazelman, vice president of product strategy and chief evangelist; and Gregg Petersen, regional director for the Middle East, Africa, and the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation, led discussions around availability and the impact it is having on business continuity and disaster recovery.
Respected South African independent trends analyst, Dion Chang, provided the keynote speech in which he discussed the ripple effect that game-changing technologies have on business and how companies manage the disruption and alter business models to ensure that they do not become obsolete.
“Every company in the world has become a software-driven organisation. They rely on data and applications for all aspects of their business with uptime being essential to the livelihood of the enterprise. This means that availability has become a global challenge. According to the 2016 Veeam Availability Report, the average hourly cost of downtime worldwide is $80,000,” said Petersen.
This, he added, has resulted in more business-critical applications moving into a virtualised environment. By doing so, organisations are showing their intent of moving away from a legacy world into a more dynamic, always on environment.
Hazelman echoed the point by stating that the shift in always-on adoption has seen Veeam releasing more new products in 2016 than at any other time in its history. “These products are built around ensuring that organisations across industry sectors and sizes are able to address specific challenges around reducing the availability gap and catering for data access around the clock irrespective of device used.”
For Hazelman, the Veeam vision of providing solutions designed for availability and disaster recovery for the always-on enterprise illustrates the importance of a new way of thinking in business today. “This is an exciting time for enterprises but one in which they need to keep continued business operations and the availability of data in mind. Without having 24.7.365 access to mission-critical data, the relevance of the organisation is bought into question,” he concluded.
