Employees take holidays cybercriminals don’t

cassThe summer months can sometimes feel strained as businesses strive to maintain day-to-day customer expectations with a reduced workforce.

During this period our job is to help businesses to do more than keep the lights on, even when they’re not operating at full capacity. These are my top tips for businesses to remain productive and protected over the holidays.

1. Proactively protect your data

Employees take holidays, but cybercriminals and software bugs don’t. In fact, malicious attacks and unplanned outages can happen at any time. We recently undertook research that looked at importance of data management to business’ success, the result, the 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management Report demonstrated that application downtime costs organizations a total of $20m globally in lost revenue and productivity each year. Businesses can ill-afford to suffer the consequences of downtime, with over half of business leaders agreeing that outages have an impact on customer confidence. Investing in robust backup and disaster recovery solutions can help businesses ensure that their data is protected in the event of unplanned downtime.

2. Maximise the value of AI

Cloud Data Management technologies that enable greater automation allows IT personnel to focus limited time and resources on delivering strategic value to the business. Our research showed that 81% of UK businesses have already deployed or plan to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the next 12 months. As well as augmenting the intelligence and capacity of IT managers and teams generally, AI and machine learning technologies can be trained to undertake time-consuming and repetitive processes. When deployed across other areas of business, automation can lessen the load for individuals and teams with larger workloads due to the absence of their colleagues.

3. Adopt a data-driven approach to resource planning

Though it can be testing, the holiday period should not present businesses with surprises. Using data analytics, businesses can manage resources more effectively and plan for multiple absences accordingly. With 91% of business leaders viewing employees improving their digital skills as vital to their success, organizations should consider extending IT capabilities to other departments beyond IT to provide better air cover in the summer months. This more data-driven approach can help businesses maintain seasonal productivity.

4. Backup, backup, backup!

A team with reduced capacity doesn’t leave room for disasters. Backup is an essential process of powering an intelligent business, and yet less than one third of businesses continuously back up and replicate high priority applications. Through integrating backup solutions into a broader Cloud Data Management strategy, businesses can ensure that backing up is a highly automated and continuous procedure, allowing IT personnel to focus on enabling digital transformation. This gives the business peace of mind and ensures that data is always available even at times when IT departments are depleted.

Given the importance of data-driven decision making for businesses across banking, retail and healthcare, it’s critical that its digital infrastructure is fully available, operational and protected, no matter the time of year.