By Lisa Strydom, Senior Manager: Channel and Alliances for Africa at Veeam Africa

Across the Middle East and Africa (MEA), 79% of companies have a protection gap between how much data they can lose and how frequently IT protects their data. This is according to the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2023 which asked IT leaders and implementers what data protection drivers and challenges they anticipated in the coming year. The study highlighted the importance of cyber-resiliency and ransomware preparedness.

According to the report, 45% of respondents believe that ransomware was their biggest hindrance to digital transformation and IT modernisation initiatives. This means it is essential for companies to have a comprehensive Modern Data Protection strategy in place should the worst happen – one that delivers robust security, immutable backups and speedy recovery in the event of a disaster.

It is here where the channel can be a vital enabler, their expertise and experience can be gold dust for customers looking to maximise the benefits of digitisation, whilst minimising their risk of disaster. Vendor partners should take the initiative of having discussions with their clients on how and why they need to build resilience against ransomware and other disasters, and orchestrate effective recovery at speed. It sounds hard and off-putting to businesses who perhaps lack the skills or resources, but the channel partners they work with can lighten the load considerably.

For their part, companies must understand what the mission-critical applications are that they need to get up and running in this protected environment. Communication plays a vital role to enable this. This is required from both internal and external perspectives. IT and business managers must work closely with their employees and teams to identify the priority areas. Armed with that understanding, partners can help to prepare a strategy for resilience, security and disaster recovery that can encompass these, while still giving the flexibility to scale as the business grows or its needs change.

Local challenges

One of the challenges in South Africa when it comes to effective data protection is budget, which may be why firms in the region plan to increase investment in this area by 5.8%. Projects can quickly become too expensive if they are not implemented with a partner in a targeted way, but failing to invest in resilience, security and disaster recovery measures is to fail to protect the business and the data it depends upon.  Just like an insurance policy, you don’t want to use it and never know when you are going to need it. But if you wait until disaster strikes to put something in place, it will be too late to avert or mitigate the disaster at hand, and will also cost more to rectify.

For firms with protection and recovery measures in place, the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2023 found that 78% of businesses across the Middle East and Africa have an availability gap. In other words a disconnect between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly their IT teams can bring them back.

This means all but 22% of firms can be confident that they won’t lose ground in the face of disruption – regardless of cause. And with only 14% of companies across the region revealing they have never experienced any ransomware attacks in the past 12 months according to the report, it really is a case of how often, rather than if or when, a compromise occurs.

Clearly, there is still work to be done in terms of improving resilience and recoverability, including bolstering education and awareness across the region’s businesses. Decision-makers must understand the importance of data protection and disaster recovery beyond only having cybersecurity solutions in place. It is about introducing resiliency to ensure data workloads are safe – whether in physical, virtual, cloud, SaaS or container ecosystems. Fortunately, the pandemic’s effect in accelerating digitisation and hybrid working have helped increase the awareness associated with the need for data availability and disaster recovery. But in a complex, integrated and demanding world, protection gaps need to be reduced.

Partner help

This provides an ideal platform for channel partners to add value. Channel partners should work closely with customers to identify the relevant use cases for resilience and disaster recovery. Whether driven by cybersecurity or broader areas of IT vulnerability, discussions between companies and solutions providers must focus on creating a local awareness for the need of having compliant solutions that centre on data protection and availability. If data is the lifeblood of an organisation, then IT can be likened to its circulatory system. To keep these systems in good health, prevention is better than cure.

Channel partners are the consultants that help firms identify the ways they can keep their IT and the business dependent upon it in good shape. For example, the last line of defence against ransomware is fast recovery from secure, immutable backups. Recency and quality of backups is a basic essential, but the instant and automatic ability to restore and recover is what separates good strategies from great ones. But defending against ransomware is therefore just one aspect of disaster recovery.

This is where a partner adds value, as the channel creates awareness around wider requirements and new features that provide enterprises with additional insights and benefits they would perhaps not know about or consider. Being reliant on partners with the right set of competencies and expertise to deliver resilience and disaster recovery at the scale needed are critical to data availability. The channel must therefore be experts on the industry-specific requirements of their clients and tailor disaster recovery solutions for them accordingly.

Companies want to know they are working with specialists who are trusted advisors. Such a partner-driven approach can help organisations ensure their Modern Data Protection strategies deliver the level of data security, recovery and availability essential for the digital world.