Recovery Nirvana, Heterogeneous Backup, BYOD, ROI, and TCO

In my earlier post, I positioned that the world of IT is becoming more, not less, heterogeneous. What I didn’t address was “why?”

The simple reasons are the old standbys: TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and ROI (Return on Investment.) Even when you’re not quantitatively tracking these, you’re aware of them – because at the end of the day, we in IT have to live within our means. One of the best ways to decrease TCO is to simplify – and one easy way to simplify is to build homogeneous environments.

This is one reason that in the smallest companies, you see more Windows-only environments today. It makes sense. The fewer resources you have to spend on IT, the less resources you have to manage diverse assets within that environment.

The problem is ROI and thinking about IT as a strategic advantage rather than as only a cost. Small, medium, and large businesses that want to grow faster tend to view IT more as a weapon in their fight to grow their business. And because technology so rapidly changes, there’s a tendency by these enterprises to use newer technology to gain a competitive advantage. Those newer technologies may be different types of servers, storage, operating systems, hypervisors, applications – all the way to embracing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) as a method of hiring the best and brightest inside and outside of IT.

In short, more successful companies tend to think of their IT staff and their IT infrastructure as ways to increase revenue and profit – they focus on ROI. This puts a premium on innovation within IT, and means that it’s more difficult for IT to predict the future since technology not only rapidly evolves, but there are also revolutionary changes as well.

In my next and final post in this series, we’ll discuss what this specifically means to your backup strategy and how you can future-proof it.

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