Plans are well underway in Asia and around the world to celebrate Chinese New Year which begins on February 19. Here are 8 fun facts about CNY and corresponding tips to help guide your Data Protection strategy in the Lunar New Year.
1. The traditional Chinese New Year celebration lasts 15 days. This makes it the longest and most important festival for Chinese all over the world. My advice is to use this time to reflect on how you can help drive down costs, reduce risk and accelerate your efforts to deliver Data Protection-as-a-Service to your organization.
2. 2015 is the Year of the Goat. The goat (sheep or ram) is among the animals that people like most. If you want to be liked by your organization, put a strategy in place to ensure you do not suffer data loss or downtime similar to the 64% of organizations who experience this last year.1
3. Everyone goes home for the Chinese New Year celebrations, if they can. The period just before the Chinese New Year, called chunyun (春运), is the busiest travel time of the entire year. If your mission critical systems are not running on continuous available platforms like EMC VPLEX, put these in your plans for 2015 – you do not want your holiday ruined with system outages.
4. The Chinese New Year is seen as the perfect time to do some spring cleaning. Traditionally, it was believed that cleaning house for the New Year’s celebrations swept bad luck away and helped ensure good fortune in the year to come. Sounds like a great time to review your archiving strategy, to spring clean your information and store it on a storage/cloud platform optimized for long term retention.
5. Traditional foods include fish, which is served at the end of the New Year’s meal and symbolizes abundance, and a sticky fruitcake called nian gao (年糕). Take a moment while enjoying your feast to reflect on the fact that more is not always better, it turns out that if you have multiple vendors protecting your data, it will cost your more and you will experience more down time.1
6. Red decorations are everywhere, because the color red is considered to be one of the luckiest colors of all. Red can also be an unlucky color if it indicates your backups are failing and you’re not meeting your SLAs. Deploy EMC’s Data Protection Suite with EMC’s market leading Data Domain backup appliances to ensure your year gets off to a great start.
7. Shou sui (守岁) is the practice of staying up until midnight as a family to greet the New Year. Software Defined Data Protection and automation are the keys to reducing disruptions, ensuring you’re only up late at night for celebrations.
8. During the Chinese New Year, people often greet each other by shouting “auspicious phrases” thought to bring luck, like gong xi fa cai (恭喜发财), which translates to “congratulations and be prosperous”. To ensure your new year is full of good fortune, make sure there’s an appropriate data protection solution in place for all of your critical data no matter where it is or how it is generated. To all of my Chinese friends, colleagues and customers, gong xi fa cai.