The truth about IT disaster recovery in Africa & what your organisation is up against

Even though the protection of data is crucial, globally, a reported 60% of organisation don’t have a disaster recovery plan, or in the case that they do have the sense to have one, the plan has holes in it so serious, it fails at the first test. This figure is not surprising though to people in IT – we know these things and somehow leave it to chance and pray that nothing serious happens on our watch.

Here are the serious IT and data backup & restore problems organizations in this country have to grapple:

  1. No disaster recovery preparedness at all. Doesn’t make sense in this age ofcourse but yes, only 40% have a working plan. The rest have all kinds of reasons why they live high risk like that. Reasons range from not getting any support (read money) from the business leaders – but taking the fall when things go wrong -; trusting that if nothing drastic has happened for a while it must mean there’s nothing to worry about (yea, really!); and sometimes not having the required skill to have a working plan in place.
  2. Speaking about skill, it’s no secret that Zimbabwe has a skills problem. As soon as an IT professional is able to find a better paying job (or just the prospects of one) outside the country, they leave. Yes, if you’re a techie reading this from Zimbabwe you’ll probably argue that you are very skilled and happy at home. Indeed you are, but that doesn’t mean the country as a whole is not facing  a serious skills shortage problem.
    If advanced countries like the US are taking measures to address what they see as an urgent problem – it’s much worse here. It’s a problem because it means even when an organization invests in a solution to protect their data and recover it efficiently when disaster strikes, they need someone to operate the systems effectively. Without adequate skill, the invest is goes down the drain. Unless ofcourse they spend a system that takes out the skills requirement.
  3. Endpoint solutions that leaves user to decide what to backup. With a plan in place and skills not a problem (because you dear reader are there) there’s the problem of what solution you use. Most endpoint backup and recovery solutions for example require the intervention of the user to complete a backup of the laptop, tablet or mobile phone. At best, a “please backup now” prompt shows on the user’s screen, and leaves this critical decision to the user. Ofcourse 90% of the time the user is busy doing what they were hired for and can’t be bother with such prompts – “remind me later” is the button they click, or worse, “skip”.
  4. The mobile and BYOD nightmare. These devices, especially those used by the critical individuals high up the organisation’s food chain, don’t have any endpoint backup at all. The business execs using the tablets and smartphones ofcourse assume that all the data is being automatically backed up. When a problem arises however – say they are a victim of a smash and grab – the painful realisation is that all the documents and communication on the mobile device, is lost along with the hardware. If you’re lucky, the problem leads to the opportunity of backup and restore, and the investment needed, being taken a little more seriously.

End of the day, the reality is that the IT backup and restore needs have changed drastically in recent years. Cloud happened, thankfully. We don’t have to rely on expensive non-elastic onsite hardware that is mostly just a disaster in waiting – hence a whole “IT disaster recovery” industry addressing in a very painstakingly manual way, a problem that solutions like CrashPlanAfrica have eliminated. Mobile too happened and brought with it numerous challenges for IT departments. A phenomenon it ushered in, BYOD, is happening now.

We have learnt drastic lessons too in recent years: Like the realisation that being able to recover the servers alone and no plan to restore the endpoint in not enough. We also now know users will not take the backup nomatter how much we insist that it’s their responsibility to do so – it’s not, btw, they are right to assume it’s taken care of already.

This new reality calls for a new way of looking at the whole concept of backup and restore. It also calls for the realisation that ensuring everything, on every device, at any time, is backed up and ready to restore, need not be a nightmare, and it needs no specialised skill in the organisation.

This article was sponsored by CrashPlanAfrica, the providers of a backup and restore solution for endpoint data enabling secure, automatic, quiet and simple to administer protection of organizational data. You can read more about CrashPlanAfrica and what it can do for your organization here: www.crashplanafrica.com.

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