July 13, 2017

Chances are you once thought your current BDR solution would change everything. You hoped for something that would help you recover quickly from any disaster, while making your backups easier to manage and your testing less of a burden. But if you invested in it a while ago, these days that BDR solution may demand too much of your time and saddle you with downtime that’s just too long.

You know better solutions are out there - but often your leadership would rather spend budget on what they see as more exciting or important technology.

So let’s talk about the secret to getting buy-in: emphasizing money. Your leader probably thinks a new BDR solution is just another investment. By emphasizing the business benefits from a faster and more advanced system, you’re more likely to get budget.

Here’s how.

First, outline the ways your old legacy system is costing you.

Go through your BDR ecosystem and note where you’re spending time and effort. How many meetings and phone calls are involved to resolve what should be a simple issue? How much time are you spending on testing backups – or creating them for that matter?

Put a dollar sign on downtime. Looking back at past disasters, what stopped you from a speedy recovery? Then calculate how much it cost in terms of lost productivity, brand damage and sacrificed transactions.

Calculate how hard downtime is on your team. It’s always urgent when your servers are down, your e-mail is out and none of your apps are available – but what’s the impact on the team? If they are exhausting themselves over and over just to keep your systems running, you’ll end up with a burned-out crew.

Assess your risk. If you get breached, can you recover quickly enough? What if you get hit with Ransomware – would you be forced to pay the ransom or could you quickly failover and keep the lights on? If you’re still relying solely on backup tapes, how vulnerable are you to theft, fires, flood, corruption or disintegration?

Look back at the add-ons and hidden costs. All too often a solution seems affordable, especially when it’s software-only, until required hardware, extra licensing and other components keep driving up the Total Cost of Ownership to a sum much greater than your perceived costs.

Now that you know where your current solution is letting you down, calculate the benefits and savings with a new solution.

Save money with cloud BDR. Turn capital expenditures into operational costs, while reducing your datacenter bills. Your organization can expand regionally without investing in a physical expansion of your BDR budget.

Minimize downtime with speedy recovery. A fast BDR system provides faster data migration and backup creation – but most importantly, it lets you spin up a backup or clone of your environment in just minutes. Sales keep flowing, employees stay productive and your team has the breathing room to fix the problem.

Protect your data with a secure solution. If your current solution leaves backups unprotected, any breach or Ransomware attack will be much more devastating to the future of the organization. A BDR solution that encrypts data in motion and at rest offers a level of insurance no matter what happens.

Look for a unified solution. Your team can save time and gain strong support by working with just one vendor who can handle everything. You’ll have one negotiation process, transparent pricing, one support team and a smoother relationship.

Choose a BDR solution that can help you grow. If your organization is facing a future of expanding data and an expanding industry footprint, you need a solution that can scale both storage and compute to meet your changing needs. You’ll have the freedom to grow as fast as you need.

A weak or slow BDR solution robs you of many things: time, transactions, employee morale, IT innovation, customer faith and more. Educate your leadership on the potential possible with a faster, modern BDR solution and you’re much more likely to get the green light.