The great thing about running a Mom & Pop store is the familiarity of everyone who comes to the store. Mom and pop know everything that’s on the shelves, and also know all of the customers and their needs for every visit. Mom and pop have what’s referred to as transparency into their market. Their supply of commodities is mapped to the smallest detail, and they have specific knowledge of their customers’ needs. Imagine a Mom & Pop storage department. It’s small, customizable, and administratively ad-hoc for every customer’s data protection needs. Now imagine what happens when mom and pop expand and grow into an enterprise IT infrastructure with data centers all over the world, and Peta bytes worth of data storage stocked on the shelves.

When companies are small it’s easy to keep track of which data needs what level of service. Large companies, on the other hand, span the globe and consist of incredibly complex environments including infrastructure, process, people, and skills. It’s impossible for organizations to survive on a global scale with that small business mentality, so why is it then that large companies resist finding transparency in their IT backup market?

For one, large businesses are just that – large. Infrastructure, people, departments, and applications are many and varied. Storage/backup staffs are much more concerned about day-to-day operations and issues than they are in any proactive strategy for the business unit next door. This in turn lends to a silo mentality, where every piece of the organization is concerned only about their needs and goals. Because of the blinders put up around the silo, a zone of control is also established that other groups and departments, especially storage, have difficulties penetrating. This silo phenomenon creates a culture within the business that hinders process and change, thus creating solid, opaque walls without any windows of transparency.

To correct this, storage teams need to take a more trickle down approach to communicating strategies. Begin at the upper most levels of management and communicate the benefits of a service strategy in a compelling way. The ocean doesn’t boil in a day, but a weak message also won’t impress anyone with clout. Specific targeted goals that run the middle ground are necessary to break the silo walls, and ease the ingrained fear of change in what’s perceived as an impossibly complex environment.

-Brian Sakovitch, GlassHouse Consultant