Staffing Challenges and Backup Infrastructure Vulnerabilities

According to an independent report by recruitment firm Robert Half, 70% of Australian employers state they expect to be negatively impacted financially by not having access to the required skills in 2023. CIOs in particular are feeling the challenge with 52% identifying the talent shortage as their primary staffing challenge for the next 12 months.

The IT industry is inherently one of rapid and constant change. This tends to exacerbate the skill shortage issues as the traditional infrastructure projects and delivery and operations teams are attempting to keep pace with the skills required to run effective cloud-native environments.

On top of this already prevalent challenge, the recent surge in highly mediatised cybersecurity incidents is pushing companies to look closer at their environments. Boards and Executive teams are coming under increasing pressure from shareholders and customers to ensure systems continue to function and data remains secure. As a result, internal resources and skills that were already in high demand are now becoming extremely hard not only to recruit but to retain. IT departments must be very selective as to which skills they prioritise, often focusing on preventative actions on the production environment and leaving the backup environment as somewhat of an afterthought.

The Impact of Staffing Challenges on Backup Environments

Without the proper attention being paid to the backup infrastructure, an organisation becomes increasingly vulnerable to threats and incidents over time. From a traditional operational standpoint, backup and recovery infrastructure is only as good as the last successful recovery. Organisations become highly vulnerable to extended outages following an incident without adequate staff to manage the backup infrastructure, confirming backup jobs are running across all required infrastructure and confirming data and services are recoverable.

Additionally, not keeping backup infrastructure properly maintained leads to increased chances of vulnerabilities being exploited. Backup and recovery infrastructure is a prime target for nefarious actors to cause damage to an organisation by increasing the time it takes the target to recover from an attack or preventing the recovery entirely. A well-maintained backup environment will be regularly patched to ensure vulnerabilities are mitigated and the configuration will be regularly reviewed to ensure all security features are enabled and configured to increase the reliability of the system. It will also have new features reviewed, activated, and configured as soon as they become available.

So, how can already stretched-out IT teams be on top of this when most are already struggling to keep up with daily operations? What solutions exist for large organisations in a market where the necessary skills are becoming increasingly harder to find?

Outsourcing as an augmentation of your team

To make sure you make the best use of your resources, the first thing to do is to evaluate your team’s skills and make sure they are best utilised. We would suggest running a health and security assessment in order to determine what your priorities should be in terms of the performance of your backup environment.

Outsourcing then seems like the best compromise to get the right skillset without having to recruit internally, but it doesn’t have to be an either-or type of scenario. For a lot of organisations, the right partner will come in, not to replace internal skills, but to augment them and bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to a team suffering from resource constraints.

A service provider allows many benefits; they can be brought in to run a specific project or implement a business requirement that otherwise would have been delayed. They can also be a long-term partner dedicated to all or parts of your backup environments to take the pressure off your staff while ensuring your environment is always up-to-date and protected.

To learn more about how Venn IT can assist you and your teams, get in touch with us.