Vendor selection is no easy feat, especially when choosing the right vendor for one of the most important parts of your business—your data. Why? The amount of data businesses store is not stagnant. Your data is always changing, business needs are constantly evolving, and the number and type of threats to your data are growing at an exponential rate. As a best practice, you should routinely evaluate your enterprise backup and data protection environments to ensure your current solution is right for you.
Here are five helpful tips if you’re tackling vendor selection on your own
- Review your existing requirements. Identify what your current data protection and backup needs are and how they will evolve based on your projected business needs.
- Research industry-leading solutions. Now that you know what your needs are, pencil in time to learn about vendor solutions that meet your needs.
- Evaluate industry-leading solutions. Once you identify the vendor solutions that work best for your business, evaluate how well each solution is equipped to meet your current and future Will this solution grow with you? Don’t forget to compare ease of use, total cost, test the solutions beforehand, and review what an implementation plan would look like for each. Depending on your requirements, you may want to inquire about vendor implementation support.
- Score solutions. Figuring out a scoring system can be difficult, but try to narrow down a list of things that matter most such as operating systems, virtualization, application support, archiving, hardware integration, etc., and rate how each vendor solution meets your needs.
- Select and implement your vendor solution. Your vendor selection should be based on how well the solution matched your needs and wants. Remember, your selection should support your current and future needs. Now that you’ve made your pick, you’ll need to put into action the implementation plan you discussed in the evaluation phase. Make sure you have adequate support to ensure that your integration runs smoothly.
These tips will take time to complete when put into practice, so set reasonable timelines.
If researching and identifying the right vendor sounds daunting, you’re not alone
This process can quickly eat up time and resources, which is why the Sirius RFP Management and Vendor Selection offering helps relieve clients of this task by providing the necessary documentation to make the most informed decision. The Sirius RFP Management and Vendor Selection process
- Validates the request
- Manages the information-gathering stage
- Evaluates industry-leading solutions
- Assists the client with proper scoring
- Validates architecture of proposed solutions
- Selects the appropriate vendor
Leveraging Sirius’ perspective and intellectual property for RFP Management and Vendor Selection services fundamentally changes the decision dynamics in selecting technologies that run your business. From beginning to end, our data protection and information management (DPIM) experts will help you choose the vendor solution that best meets your needs, provide proof of concept, evaluate feature functionality, design and architecture, compare pricing, and handle the implementation phase.
Our DPIM team expands the limits of data protection by working with all vendors to independently evaluate the DPIM landscape and provide the functionality clients require. Sirius’ dedicated DPIM team is comprised of pre- and post-sales engineers holding over 130 of the highest-level certifications in the data protection industry, as well as cross-industry certifications. Beyond the software, Sirius DPIM experts fully understand client environments, which means you’re in good hands.
If you would like to speak with a Sirius data protection specialist about the Sirius RFP Management and Vendor Selection offering please speak with your Sirius representative or contact us directly at dpim@siriuscom.com.
