Month: June 2020

The outsourcing of back office processes has come in and out of fashion over the years. But just like your favourite pair of jeans it has never completely fallen out of favour. Like your trusty denim its popularity has sometimes been threatened, with the most recent threat being from Software as a Service (SaaS). With the SaaS promise of simplicity, scalability and automation why consider outsourcing if a modern software platform can do it all for you? There is a very simple answer. Outsourcing remains popular today because it has evolved. In fact, it has evolved so far beyond the scope of ‘traditional’ outsourcing that it has become disruptive!

Old versus new.

Traditional outsourcing has always had its feet planted in the cost reduction & improved efficiency camp. It has never really ventured too far outside these boundaries. It is because of this lack of movement that we are seeing traditional outsourcing models under threat and in serious decline. On the flip side those providers that are taking advantage of cloud scalability, automation and analytics (just like the SaaS providers) are quickly gaining market share and seeing massive growth.

By harnessing this modern technology, providers are delivering enhanced customer value that efficient outsourced processes and cost reduction alone could never achieve. The focus of these providers has moved from a simple lift and shift of traditional processes, to delivering upfront transformation of business processes through automation. Automation frees up the outsourcers to add additional value to customers and tackle the hard to fix issues that businesses never get time to fix alone. Businesses looking to outsource are starting to recognise that modern technology solutions can revolutionise the way they receive their outsourced service. No longer is outsourcing just about getting rid of a problem while saving some cash. Customers still expect this but they now expect a whole lot more.

Is cost saving enough?

Take the area of backup and recovery. Many businesses will outsource this as it is often the most cost-effective way for them to protect their data. Why go through the hassle and expense of hiring and training people up in complex tools and processes when businesses can simply chuck this over the fence to people who do this day in and day out?

Sure, they will save on money, stress and some of the responsibility but is that enough? If the outsourcer simply picks up where their teams left off, how do they know their backup success rates are as good as they can possibly be?

How do they know if they are making best use of their infrastructure and costly storage pools? How do they ensure their data protection spend and effort is apportioned correctly between their most and least valuable data sets?

How do they ensure that if they have a disaster they are 100% guaranteed to get their data back?

It is these sorts of challenges that a disruptive outsourcer will solve. In fact a good disruptive outsourcer will thrive on doing this and not see it as a hardship. This is that extra value that business will struggle to get from traditional outsourcing. It is possible because disruptive outsourcers know how to blend great SaaS-style technology with great people for maximum impact at a competitive price point.

Don’t be threatened. Innovate.

This is happening everywhere. In the Accounting, Payroll and Recruitment industries, it’s clear disruptive outsourcing is driving extraordinary change.. Businesses expect more than cost reduction from from outsourcing. They will turn to service providers who can help them innovate.

You could argue that SaaS has threatened Outsourcing. Or  like your best pair of jeans you could argue that the latest fashion trends drive the denim industry to continually innovate.

Everyone wants to be Lionel Messi

Michael Jordan, Pelé and Mia Hamm. History has shown us that we remember and talk about these types of players more often than those in defensive roles (putting athletes like Dennis Rodman or Cafu aside of course!). It is the same with data.

Just like most sports there are two sides to data; defence & offence (or Defense and Offense for our American readers). When data defence and data offence are discussed in business it is highly likely that the chat will quickly turn towards offence. This often happens because a strong data offence strategy gives a business an exciting platform for growth. And this is what drives most business leaders.

Either side could win it, or it could be a draw!

But if the focus of business investment is offence, spending less on governance and security increases risk. This means that a business could start to lose just as quickly as the offensive strategy sets it up to win. As Sir Alex Ferguson once said ‘Attacking wins games, but defending wins championships’. What Sir Alex means is that good defence ensures that you’re not losing ground and this in turn allows your offensive strategy to be much more effective.

Its squeaky-bum time.

The words from Sir Alex are probably more relevant today then they have ever been. The current crisis has seen much of the economy go into a deep freeze as businesses try and figure out their next move, while simultaneously looking at ways to preserve cash. As governments around the world look to kick start their economies back to life it will be interesting to see which strategy businesses will take.

Will we see them setting themselves up like a Jose Mourinho Spurs side? Will they go into a 99% defensive, hunker-down mode and then with the remaining 1% try and pick off any chances that come their way? Or will they setup themselves up like Thomas Tuchel’s Paris Saint-Germain to attack and drive new ways of operating, so they don’t just survive the pandemic but accelerate out of it?

Sometimes in football you have to score goals.

So how does this relate to data? Well a strong data defence strategy will ease the effort needed to deliver your data offence strategy. If data is well controlled, defined & protected then it becomes much easier to reuse this critical resource for offence. So, while data defence may not be as exciting as offence, it is just as important.

The question then is a simple one. Do you setup yourselves up with a play not to lose strategy? Or do you play to win? Just like with football teams the answer will be different for every business. Whatever you decide, ensure your defence is watertight because without this your growth will always be fragile.

If you want help ensuring your data defence is watertight why not check out Predatar Insights and get the inside track on your data performance here.

Backup was in the spotlight again last week with news from IBM, Veeam and Kasten. The latter two companies teaming up to solve the complexity of data protection for hybrid clouds. Veeam established in virtual machine protection, Kasten focused on Kubernetes workloads.

Not to be outdone, IBM announced enhancements to Storage Protect to support its corporate strategy of helping enterprise customers transition workloads to cloud. Notable announcements included backup for AWS EC2 instances and extended use of Object storage and tape, burnishing its security credentials. Improved integration with Kubernetes Labels will make it easier for developers to protect application data and systems, in groups.

Anonymous Spin

Unfortunately, both announcements were filled with references to malware and cyber crime in general. This, rather than the new features, is the focus of the blog. It got us wondering what triggers backup, or more accurately, recovery incidents? We looked at data in Predatar over a five-year period from 2014 (roughly the period when ransomware became part of the general IT psyche), to 2019.

Some observations.

Firstly, every organisation did at least one restore in any calendar year, ranging from dozens to thousands of restores. As a percentage, average recovery ranged from 2.5% to 4% of total data backed up. If a company backed up 100TB of data, in any calendar year it would recover between 2.5TB and 4TB. It has a 1 in 25 chance of needing to recover a known data set, regardless of whether it is the victim of a ransomware attack.

It’s not the extreme tail-risks that’ll get you (or your data at least), but boring, often routine, malfunctions and errors.

Media Spin

Newsrooms and media barons don’t attract audiences or sell newspapers with the mundane. For every news grabbing homicide in the USA, twenty-five people die quietly from heart problems. The data protection barons seem intent on copying this narrative by insisting every press release is laced with images of corporate calamity at the hands of cyber criminals.

Secondly, what’s important is not so much your ability to avoid all incidents but your ability to handle them well. There has been a tendency, as the technologists we are, to rely too much on automation and product features. We try to design and architect out of existence every conceivable failure. This is admirable but it’s impossible to avoid random but inevitable events. It’s more important to stay alert. Mortality figures again offer up an example…

Take it for a Spin

Did you know in some European countries, more pedestrian-crossing users (“zebra” for our American friends) die than jaywalkers? The health and safety interventions designed to protect us can have unintended consequences. Foot walkers switch off when using a zebra crossing; jaywalkers stay alert.

The secret to staying “backup alert” is to test and test regularly.

If there is a must-have feature on your data protection shopping list, it’s the ability to regularly and systematically perform recovery testing. This won’t make your data immune from threats or catastrophic events, but it will make your system more robust.