Modern digital & cloud technology underpins the shift that enables businesses to implement new processes, scale quickly and serve customers in a whole new way.

Historically, organisations would invest in their own IT infrastructure to support their business objectives, and the IT department’s role would be focused on keeping the ‘lights on.’

To minimize the chance of failure of the equipment, engineers traditionally introduced an element of redundancy in the architecture. That redundancy could manifest itself on many levels. For example, it could be a redundant data centre, which is kept as a ‘hot’ or ‘warm’ site with a complete set of hardware and software ready to take the workload in case of the failure of a primary data  centre. Components of the data centre, like power and cooling, can also be redundant to increase the resiliency.

On a lesser scale, within a single data centre, networking infrastructure elements can be redundant. It is not uncommon to procure two firewalls instead of just one to configure them to balance the load or just to have a second one as a backup. Power and utility companies still stock up on critical industrial control equipment to be able to quickly react to a failed component.

Traditional Data Protection

The majority of effort, however, went into protecting the data storage. Magnetic disks were assembled in RAIDs to reduce the chances of data loss in case of failure, and backups were relegated to magnetic tapes to preserve less time-sensitive data and stored in separate physical locations.

Depending on specific business objectives or compliance requirements, organizations had to heavily invest in these architectures. One-off investments were, however, only one side of the story. On-going maintenance, regular tests and periodic upgrades were also required to keep these components operational. Labor, electricity, insurance and other costs (Read more...)