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Existing systems are being stretched to increase their value, while investment in new IT is under greater scrutiny. Customers are demanding more from their IT spend.
For resellers that specialise in business continuity or disaster recovery (DR), this can be frustrating. Protecting critical infrastructure and applications provides real value, but it’s only when something goes wrong that DR proves its worth.
Even when the IT team is fully behind a project, the board may not now go ahead without evidence of financial benefits.
Because of this, return on investment (RoI) tools and calculators are making a comeback as part of the sales process to support IT proposals. For resellers, providing RoI information on DR will be more effective built into a larger overall strategy.
Instead of simply protecting applications or services, DR can support a more dynamic approach to IT infrastructure.
Virtualisation also makes business continuity planning easier. Applications are not tied to a specific, physical server. Fewer servers mean the overall risk profile for the applications and services increases.
DR becomes more important because more services could be affected in a failure.
While virtualisation can make the case for investment stronger by reducing costs and improving flexibility, DR planning and skills can ensure this dynamic infrastructure vision is actually delivered.
Traditional DR is also being earmarked for cost savings. A good example is tape-based back-up – while cheap to implement initially, the cost of recovery and risk of failure means more layered approaches to DR are being sought.
Bringing data replication, virtualisation and tape together means recovery can happen faster. Investment in new technology replaces some manual processing. The downtime during failure and back-up failure risks can be reduced, potentially saving money.
Such a combination solution can make a move over to virtual IT work in the longer term. Channel partners can also provide managed services around data replication and hosting.
By looking at managed services and working strategically with the customer, DR resellers can provide direct business benefit as well as insurance.
Ian Masters is UK sales director at Double-Take Software
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