Does such an enthusiastic willingness to embrace change make good business or IT sense? Change is an "in" word this year (as well as last), and one of the models of change we might consider in light of the CA study is the Lewin/Schein change theory, also known as the unfreezing-change-refreeze model. Unfreezing is the process of becoming motivated to change, such as present conditions leading to dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction could be over the elements that are important to the business (one of the questions), such as better control over the backup process, ability to scale disaster recovery solutions as the business grows, and implementing a reliable disaster recovery plan.
The next step in this model is change. What requires change needs to be carefully identified, and the view of the new state of affairs needs to specify the gap between the present state and the desired state. Among the important vendor requirements identified in the CA study were: avoid costly downtime if critical servers go down, simplify software management, support backups of virtual machines and protect remote office/branch office data. The final stage in the model is refreezing or making the change permanent. That is the conclusion all vendors hope to achieve with customers finally and permanently adopting their products.
Recovery management offers much more than just the typical backup and restore processes, although backup and restore is the first thing most organizations think of when they consider recovery management. Though conventional wisdom holds that organizations treat change in their backup/recovery environments very carefully, CA's study suggests that a large majority of organizations would be willing to consider abandoning their current backup/recovery software supplier for a more integrated recovery management solution.
That would seem to indicate a massive vote of confidence for integrated recovery management solutions, or perhaps significant dissatisfaction with current solutions. But we will not hold our breaths waiting for the market to shift wholeheartedly in that direction. Whether organizations would really be willing to change is obviously subject to the economic climate ("You want to charge me how much?") But, if a good economic case can be put forward for an integrated recovery management solution, it appears as if the vendor proposing the solution will at least get a fair hearing.
David Hill is principal of Mesabi Group LLC, which focuses on helping organizations make their complex storage, storage management, and interrelated IT infrastructure decisions easier by making the choices simpler and clearer to understand.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
