If you’re a risk or compliance officer – or, in fact, anyone with a role to play in ensuring operational resilience in your organization – how do you know that the backup platforms your IT team is using are up to the task?
It’s an important question. The answer – when you think about it – is worrying.
Because typically, organizations like yours rely on the resiliency credentials that the technology vendors themselves set out. Is it any wonder that every backup vendor claims that their platform is the most resilient, when they are setting their own criteria to measure resilience?
Of course, you could ask your IT or infrastructure team – they are the experts, after all. But the brutal truth is that resilience isn’t their top priority. These teams are typically overstretched and under-resourced. Making sure that the systems and data your organization runs on every day are available under normal conditions keeps them busy enough.
Understandably, they will have a preference for the infrastructure products that make everyday management and administration easy. And, in fact, it goes beyond day-to-day practicalities. If you spend enough time with storage teams, you’ll notice that people often become deeply attached to certain vendors, defending them almost like a belief system rather than just a technology choice.
Understanding the true picture of resilience in your business becomes even more complicated when you have a large and complex infrastructure environment. An environment made up of technologies from multiple vendors – each with its own claims, its own standards, and its own devoted followers inside your business.
The idea of ‘devoted followers’ brings an interesting concept to mind – one which history has shown to be a good one: the separation of church and state. Not only has this approach been useful for monarchs who have found themselves inconveniently married, but more importantly, it has been invaluable for managing kingdoms. And, believe it or not, the concept is relevant here.
In this analogy, vendors like Dell, IBM, Pure, Veeam, Rubrik, etc are the ‘churches,’ each with its own doctrine. Useful, certainly – but not neutral.
What is needed is a ‘state’: a vendor-independent authority that sits above the fray, governing consistently across all systems. One that ensures recovery testing is meaningful, malware scanning is credible, and resilience is measured the same way everywhere.
This separation reduces conflicts of interest, standardises outcomes, and brings a much-needed layer of objectivity to an otherwise fragmented landscape.
No analogy is perfect, of course. Vendors aren’t religions, and governance platforms don’t wield civil authority, but the underlying principle still holds: resilience shouldn’t be defined by the tools themselves. Because if it is, don’t be surprised if everything looks perfect… until it really matters… and then it isn’t.
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