Going Beyond the Insurance Metaphor for Data Protection
[This is the third excerpt from our How to Sell Backup to Your CFO whitepaper.]
Like all metaphors, the insurance metaphor for data protection breaks down when analyzed in more detail. Insurance at its core is a risk transfer mechanism in which a company transfers risk in exchange for a financial payment. Data protection at its core is a key characteristic of a corporation’s information technology strategy. As such, what must be sought is not just insurance but also optimization. To a CFO, optimization fundamentally means higher productivity, which translates to an increase in projected revenue with the lowest projected possible expense.
Over the next few blog postings, I will discuss three fundamental methods of achieving higher productivity with respect to a company’s data protection strategy:
- Achieving higher productivity by optimizing capital expenditure.
- Achieving higher productivity by optimizing operational expenditure.
- Achieving higher productivity by optimizing RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) for the needs of your business.
Every CFO has a strong focus on optimizing capital expenditure – after all, capital is money. Depending upon the industry, staffing can be as much as 80% or more of the on-going expense rate of a company; thus, operational expenditure is a critical factor for a CFO seeking to increase the productivity of a corporation. As I noted previously, capital is money, and since operations is time and time is money, then optimizing capital expenditure and operational expenditure is critical.
The third fundamental method of achieving higher productivity involves optimizing the RPO and RTO associated with data protection. The RPO and RTO together essentially define the amount of time that will be spent recreating data. This will be discussed in detail in upcoming blog postings.
