How to Sell Backup to Your CFO: Part 1
Using the insurance metaphor
If you’re looking to invest in backup and recovery technology, chances are you’ll have to get sign off from multiple parties—including the CFO of your company. Since the CFO is responsible for managing the financial risks of the corporation, you would think that “selling backup” to a CFO would be easy. Wrong. Many CFOs overlook the importance of modern backup technology, thinking that existing practices are sufficient. As a result, IT managers often have to “sell backup” to the CFO.
In this three-part series, we’ll look at some strategies you can use to convince your CFO to invest in backup and recovery.
The consequences of data loss
First off, let’s examine some of the consequences of data loss. Here are some thought-provoking stats from leading research groups and tech companies:
- Data loss and downtime cost enterprises more than $1.7 trillion in the last twelve months (Vanson Bourne survey of 3300 IT decision makers)
- The average business experienced more than three working days (25 hours) of unexpected downtime in the last 12 months (Vanson Bourne survey of 3300 IT decision makers)
- Eighty percent (80%) of companies experienced downtime and lost revenue, averaging $140,003 per incident. The financial sector lost more—an average of $540,358 per incident (Dynamic Markets survey of 210 IT professionals)
- Over 70 percent (70%) of IT managers have never worked out the cost of the resulting downtime despite outages (Timico survey)
Using the insurance metaphor
Clearly, the consequences of data loss can be dire. One way to convince CFOs of the importance of backup is using the insurance metaphor. Data protection, like other forms of insurance, is an expense intended to protect the corporation in the event of foreseen or unforeseen events that put the corporation at financial risk. In other words, investing in backup is a type of financial risk management that can hedge against the possibility data loss. (Note the term “financial risk management”—it’s a concept that makes the insurance metaphor appealing because it aligns with the primary responsibility of the CFO.)
In our next post, we’ll examine how IT managers can go beyond the insurance metaphor.
For more information, download our free whitepaper How to Sell Backup to Your CFO.
