Data Protection – A Key Issue when Realigning IT with the Business
Željko Panian · WSEAS Transactions on Computers archive · 2005
In the modern business world, data is everywhere – it’s created and stored in huge volumes every day. With reliance on data-rich application software, information and communications to generate revenue and optimize costs, businesses need to know that they can recover from any temporary loss of data, whatever the cause. Most businesses have considered the impact of data loss at some point, but the majority of them still have no explicit strategy in place to deal with such an occurrence. Although implementing a data protection strategy does not remove the risks themselves, it does improve company’s ability to survive and recover. So data protection becomes an essential part of an overall IT strategy, and not just a desirable feature. This is particularly important because it is often claimed that many IT departments are not providing an adequate level of service to the rest of the company. Such claims have an impact on the way they are perceived, reducing their credibility and eliminating their place at the level where strategic decisions are made. Our thesis is that data protection plays a key role in achieving credibility of IT department, hence providing quality of service in backup/recovery field can be a strong proof of IT department's efforts to align their operation to most important corporate or business goals. By borrowing key concepts from external service providers, IT leaders have to view the success of their IT organization from a customer-centric paradigm. A five-step framework is presented that may help IT organizations to achieve service excellence in their data protection efforts. In effect, this framework is a model of the best practices and approaches to improve data protection we have witnessed in operation in some of the best Croatian firms.