ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
What matters in
the end is that
each application
has the right
platform it needs
to do what it
needs to do best.
Rick Vanover, Director
of Technical Product
Marketing & Evangelism
for Veeam Software
Rick Vanover, Director of Technical Product Marketing & Evangelism for Veeam Software.
can utilise public clouds as backup for
redundancy and disaster strategies, while
simultaneously taking advantage of its
ability to scale during periods of peak
demand, alleviating risk,” Schlosser says.
Jason Roos, Channel and Alliances
Director at Mimecast adds: “On-premises
systems were traditionally most at risk
from accidental loss, malicious deletion,
technical failure or disaster, but now the
cloud is increasingly becoming a primary
data store. Valuable customer information
held in SaaS applications, such as CRM, or
hosted email in Microsoft Office 365 are
prime examples. But while organisations
have long deployed backup and recovery
systems in conjunction with Exchange
on-premises mail servers, Office 365 offers
no independent copy of email data. There
is a growing risk of accidental deletion,
data corruption, cybercriminal attacks and
malicious users or administrators. It’s just
a matter of time before an organisation
relying on Office 365 will suffer from data
loss. Cloud-to-cloud backup strategies are
now becoming commonplace to supplement
hybrid deployments.”
Rick Vanover, Director of Technical
Product Marketing & Evangelism for
Veeam Software concurs: “Physical
disruption is one risk today among others
such as ransomware, equipment failure,
malicious staff and more. Each of these
16
risks makes backing up data in the cloud
much more attractive for a number of
reasons. Organisations invest a lot in their
datacentres and there is an incredible
expectation that this type of complete
service be kept available. The hybrid
approach becomes attractive for a number
of reasons: scale, disaster recovery, limits
of the on-premises datacentre and more.
However, what matters in the end is that
each application has the right platform it
needs to do what it needs to do best. The
expectation for it to be available today is
a given.”
Ossama Eldeeb, Senior Manager,
MENA Partner Organization, VMware
expands further: “In the growing digital
economy, data is the lifeblood of new
business insights and enhanced business
competitiveness. For Middle East
organisations and enterprises, it is a top
priority to ensure high levels of availability
and eliminate data loss, without cost
or complexity. However, Middle East
organisations are straining under the
exponential growth in data, due to the rise
in mobile devices, social media and video,
and connected devices in the Internet
of Things (IoT) era, with IoT endpoints
set to more than double to 30 billion by
2020, according to one recent industry
report. Increasingly, Middle East CIOs
are looking to extend their traditional
backup and data recovery to business
continuity measures, data classification,
data protection, information life cycle
management and data compliance.
Working with channel partners is vital
for organisations to implement digital
transformation strategies that can weigh
traditional backup and disaster recovery
against emerging cloud-based solutions.
Middle East channel partners should also
advise organisations on how to have the
proper technology infrastructure, new
security measures and, most importantly,
the regulations, tools and processes that
will allow organisations to effectively use
and consume these backup and disaster
recovery services. As a result, there is
also a significant Middle East and North
Africa market opportunity for local service
providers to provide differentiated services
to meet specific in-country requirements.”
How can the channel help their
customers anticipate the worst
and prepare for a disaster?
Johnny Karam, Vice President Emerging
Market, Veritas, says: “Business continuity
planning is a crucial part of any CIO’s role
and data backup and recovery are essential
elements of this. Information management
solutions should be designed around the
principle that data is more important than
infrastructure and the channel has an
Issue 09
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS