Data Loss, A Big Problem in Digital Transformation
Data loss is a subject whose time has come! Digital Transformation is upon us and with it the beginnings of a vibrant data economy. Extracting, manipulating, and making sense of the information content from physical assets and business processes is the essence of this new era. With it, come two growing problems: downtime, and data loss.
Downtime
Downtime is interruption, the opposite of business continuity. In a digital enterprise, more than ever, business continuity depends on high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR). Both of those depend on fast data replication.
Downtime has been studied for decades. Preventing it is better understood, but it continues to happen from time to time. Sometimes it’s kept quiet and sometimes it’s spectacularly public. But it always causes damage. When a major airline experienced IT failures recently, it not only made the headlines but it cost the company millions of dollars in lost revenue, and perhaps also in damaged brand image. Search online for “IT outage” and you will see sobering stories. Downtime is serious business.
Data Loss
Digital organizations are at the nexus of massive data flowing in and out of them. As they become more common, the value of an organization’s data assets become correspondingly more significant. As a result, one aspect of downtime that is getting more attention is the value of the data that is lost or not captured.
What is the cost to your organization if you lose your payroll, or your customer transactions for a day’s business? These painful types of data loss are harder to quantify and more importantly, ones your company doesn’t want to encounter.
OrionX Research Paper
In our recent research paper, The Cost of Data Loss and How to Avoid It, my colleague Dan Olds examines the drivers and cost categories of data loss. He has also looked at what solutions are available to prevent data loss, and highlights a particularly effective one that is based on Open Source technologies and has been downloaded an incredible 1.7 million times.
Browse through all of our free Constellation papers, or go directly to the full Data Loss paper to learn more.
Shahin is a technology analyst and an active CxO, board member, and advisor. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel Technologies (code modernization) and is an advisor to CollabWorks (future of work). He is co-host of the @HPCpodcast, Mktg_Podcast, and OrionX Download podcast.