* What's really important about disaster recovery
When a reporter asked me last week what the major impact of 9/11 was on the storage industry, a number of answers popped into my mind. But her follow-up question was even better: “If backup, recovery, and disaster planning became so important, how come so many storage companies are not doing well?”
Certainly, that day had an impact on the way people think about disaster recovery planning. We found out in the aftermath that even though we had all that optical fiber running over to the New Jersey side of the river where all the disaster recovery sites were located, that certainly wasn’t enough.
Most obvious was the fact that a lot of data had been kept on desktop and laptop machines, and that almost none of the data had been protected. Many companies were able to failover to their disaster recovery sites with ease, and were immediately able to access the data on their servers. But the data on the desktops, which by some estimates may have represented half the corporate data, was lost.
Vendors able to reach out and offer protection to desktop and laptop machines increased their value in the marketplace. They addressed a clearly defined need, and if their products were any good, they had a much better shot at success than did their competitors.
Paying attention to what users need is the key.
Certainly, vendors or service providers that can assist in disaster planning and in the recovery of critical corporate information seem to be doing quite well these days, for the most part. And so are companies that can provide some demonstrable improvement in the way we do backups and recoveries. Companies with a viable continuous data protection offering, for instance, whether it is a new product or an enhancement, seem to be doing much better than competitors that lack that capability. CDP is certainly capturing mindshare, and with it, market share.
Crafting solutions that match up to real problems seems to work pretty well.
But why then are some companies not doing well in a market that is enabling others to achieve record numbers? Because, despite the well-known maxim that a rising tide lifts all boats, the reality is that although the tides may rise and the tides may fall, only seaworthy craft will remain afloat.
You can’t count on tides to float your boat, and you can’t count on market trends to make your company successful. In both cases, however, you can be prepared against the various eventualities. If you’re a boat owner, you can have your craft checked out by the Coast Guard. If you are a corporate executive, stop drinking the corporate Kool-Aid and get out there amongst the users to find out what they really want. Remember that no matter how good the members of the marketing department may be, by the time information eventually makes its way to your office what you hear you may not really be what they said.
Think of the “telegraph” game that the children play. You know, the one where the first child whispers something into the ear of the second child, the second child whispers what she heard into the ear of the third, and by the time the message reaches the end of the line it may be wholly distorted.
When it comes to children’s games, things like that can often be pretty funny. If you screw up the corporate messaging because you didn’t hear what the market really said, the humor is lost.
