The Biggest Threat to Your Data Is the Budget

How are you protecting the company’s data from the budget?  You use RAID for drive loss, anti-virus and security to combat external forces, tape for accidental deletion or corruption. You virtualize, replicate and add redundancy to keep it available, yet the biggest threat remains the budget. 

My customers submit a budget request $X, and receive an actual budget of $Y.  Halloween is budget submittal season, and this year many feel Freddie Kruger is involved in the process as the cutting is scary.  And the volume of data grows.  And the time they need to manage it grows.  Customers feel they are protecting it from every possible threat only to be done in by the “corner office."

Mitch took a different path.  His data is “siloed,” preventing him from taking full advantage of the technology he had implemented several years ago from a previous, successful budget battle.  But, not being able to build on that success for the past two years was impacting his department and the company.  He was determined not to leave data consolidation to a central location on the Board Room floor.

Jason and I met with Mitch to look at the Data Flow Strategy.  Where did it start? What was the impact and how did it travel through the company? What did it look like when it came to rest?  We talked about the policies for data management, retention and recovery.  We asked about other “wants and wishes,” concluded our meeting after 24 minutes and returned to the office to see how we could help. 

Turns out, Mitch didn’t need much additional budget to consolidate his data.  He was going to request half of what was denied last year just to “add some drives” for capacity that could not be ignored.  His biggest request was for additional servers and infrastructure for a test/dev environment requirement.  With slightly more than those two amounts, we could centralize his data, leverage existing virtualization capacity to not buy the servers, while providing a test/dev sandbox, add off-site replication for backup to eliminate tape storage costs and provide D2D backup for quick restore and short term archive of data. 

All the internet research Mitch was doing could never provide him what he needed to win this budget battle: The ROI of spending more than what he thought he could get.  The savings after one year far exceeded the additional amount requested.  That is what a partner like GCA does.  It began with a 24 minute meeting about his data.