I don’t know about you, but I have a love/hate relationship with New Years. I love it because we’re given a blank slate (of sorts). I hate it because with the blank slate comes certain expectations. And from a professional standpoint, since the timing of New Year’s doesn’t necessarily align with the start of the fiscal year, making and keeping resolutions can be challenging. So, whether you “resolve” to do the following five things in your data center or just make them part of your everyday practice is up to you. Either way, you’ll benefit.

1. Conduct a “thorough” assessment: This may sound obvious but if you’re like the majority of organizations out there – and industry research says you probably are – you haven’t really assessed your backup and recovery environment to ensure it is aligned with business and IT objectives (more on that below). And I’m not talking here about IT’s notorious “Dirty Little Secret,” which I exposed nearly a decade ago. It’s not just talking about meeting backup windows, recovery objectives or even floor space requirements. Nor am I talking just about implementing backup and recovery processes to meet ramping virtual environments. All are essential but as IT transforms itself from a “cost center” to a “generator of business value,” understanding the value of the data you’re backing up to your organization and applying backup and recovery policies accordingly will become increasingly important, and should dictate the solutions you implement. Choices do matter, as Stephen Manley, EMC backup and recovery CTO and fellow blogger explains in his Blog mini-series: “Making the Right Choices: Don’t Get Caught with Your Pants on the Ground.”
2. Take time to innovate: As I noted in my last post, innovation is key to success; it can separate the ordinary from the extraordinary (e.g., Apple, FaceBook); the successful from the not-so-successful. The problem is, we aren’t innovating, or at least as much as we should be. We say it’s because we’re too busy (at least that’s what 41% of us said at the recent Gartner conference), so let’s make time to step outside the box. And this includes bucking trends, questioning “hype cycles” or, heck, rolling your own, etc., when it makes business and IT sense to. If nothing else, you’ll benefit from a “bigger picture” view of your backup environments from your new vantage point (outside the box), and that’s always a good thing.
3. Make a business case: One of the most common mistakes organizations – and, in this case, IT departments – can make is implementing technology for technology’s sake or, well, simply because it’s en vogue. And just like innovating for innovation’s sake, this can be a very bad thing. So, whether you’re looking to expand your use of disk-based backup, to implement version-based replicationfor the first time or virtualize more business applications, you’ll want to put together a business plan to support it. How do you ‘prove’ your projects? According to Gartner Research VP David Cappuccio, you’ll increase your odds of success, if you:
   • Clearly identify the problem you are trying to solve and the business result you will see if executed successfully.
   • Put together a short-term business plan (no more than one or two pages), which includes a current baseline, an analysis of three or four key metrics and a solution comparison.
4. Align business and technology teams: I’ve got this as number-four on the list, but if you make – and keep – only one resolution this year, this is probably the one. As I’ve mentioned, we’re all on a journey and how quickly we get there and the success we have will increasingly depend on communication between business and technology teams (as well as communication within those teams). So, go ahead, snuggle up with your business counterparts. Doing so should reduce the number of turf wars, political battles, etc., you’re experiencing, giving you more time to innovate and your projects more and better air time. Win-win.
5. Follow through. As I was preparing this post, I came across an interesting Harvard Business Review blog, in which author and strategic advisor Peter Bregman writes about his friend Byron’s ongoing struggle to achieve physical fitness. Ultimately, Bregman deduces that Byron’s problem isn’t one of motivation (Byron is a reallymotivated guy) but follow-through. “Motivation,” Bregman says, “is in the mind. Follow-through is in the practice.” Humph!Okay, I don’t necessarily disagree with the (few) comments that equate Bregman’s input to trite psychological mumbo-jumbo, but like many readers of the post, I think Bregman may have a point. I mean if you think about it some of the best-attended sessions at recent shows/conferences (VMworld, Gartner, and our own EMC World, to name just a few) have been next-generation backup and recovery-focused and market research shows strong and growing adoption of next-generation backup and recovery solutions, so motivation doesn’t seem to be an issue. Yet, there’s still a lot of tape out there, and deduplication use while strong is not ubiquitous. Could it be that we have a follow-through problem? If yes, Bregman would say we need to stop thinking and start doing in which case #1, #3 and #4 above should help.

Good luck – and a belated happy New Year!

Subscribe to Heidi Biggar's Posts