Enterprises Step Up their Disaster Recovery Strategies
Cite Cost of Downtime and More Stringent Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) as key drivers of improvement
Tweet-- Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced the India findings of its fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey, which demonstrates rising disaster recovery (DR) pressures on enterprises caused by soaring downtime costs and more stringent IT service level requirements to mitigate risk to the business. The study also shows that the DR budgets are higher in 2009 and they are expected to further increase in the next 24 months.
Even as 79 percent of Indian enterprises faced computer system failures in the last one year, virus attacks (67 percent) and fear of data loss (51 percent) are the major initiators for disaster recovery plans in Indian enterprises. Changes in technology infrastructure (e.g. virtualization, blade computing, etc.) natural disasters, pressures from customers, suppliers, and competition and compliance factors are other major factors that prompt the Indian enterprises to opt for a disaster recovery plan. Owing to disasters - 67% of Indian enterprises fear loss of data, while 63% of the enterprises are concerned about damage to customer loyalty and 49% of the enterprises are concerned about damage to competitive standing in the market.
“Disaster recovery is now a boardroom discussion in Indian enterprises. The extent of dent and damage caused by downtime due to natural, manmade and system disasters and the business continuity issues arising from it have made Indian CIOs take a 360º view on mitigation strategies, said Anand Naik, director, Systems Engineering, Symantec India. “But as enterprises confront complexities of protecting virtual environments, flat budgets and increasing internal & external risks, disaster recover strategies should be constantly evaluated and upgraded”.
The fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey highlights that while recovery time objectives were reduced to 4 hours in 2009, disaster recovery testing and virtualization are still major challenges for enterprises. Respondents report that DR testing increasingly impacts customers and revenue, and one in four tests fail.
Downtime costs are significant
The average cost of executing/implementing disaster recovery plans for each downtime incident worldwide according to respondents is US $287,600. In India, the median cost can climb to as high as US $105,000.
This is alarming when one considers that one in four tests failed and 93 percent of enterprises have had to execute on their disaster recovery plans. Respondents reported that it takes on average six hours to achieve skeleton operations after an outage, and seven hours to be up and running. This is a dramatic improvement over the 2008 findings, where a meager 26 percent believed they would have baseline operations within one day.
Increase in DR spending – 2009
The research shows that Indian enterprises allot 30 percent of their annual IT budget for disaster recovery initiatives, including backup, recovery, clustering, archiving, spare servers, replication, tape, services, disaster recovery plan development and offsite costs at data centers. Of the total respondents, 53 percent of Indian enterprises are willing to increase their spend on DR budgets over next 24 months.
Executive involvement has tripled in past year
The CIO / CTO / IT director’s involvement in DR committee is increasing significantly. According to the 2009 disaster recovery survey, 72 percent of respondents reported that their disaster recovery committees involved the CIO, CTO or IT director – a significant increase from last year’s research where only 23 percent of respondents indicated executive involvement. As budgets increase disaster recovery initiatives have become more of a competitive differentiator. Another reason for executive involvement is the increase of applications that are seen as mission critical. 59 percent of applications were deemed mission critical by respondents, and nearly the same amount is covered in disaster recovery plans. Any sort of outage to these systems will have an enormous impact to the business.
Disaster recovery testing improves but still a major challenge
21 percent of Indian enterprises test their DR plans once per year or less frequently. In addition, one in four tests still fail, showing a dramatic need for improvement in this area. Reasons most respondents cited for why enterprises aren’t testing include:
· Lack of resources in terms of people’s time (64 percent)
· Disruption to employees (52 percent)
· Budget (48 percent)
· Disruption to customers (49 percent)
Also a concern is that more enterprises reported that disaster recovery testing increasingly impacts customers and revenue over previous years. 49 percent of respondents reported that disaster recovery testing will impact their enterprises’ customers and 35 percent reported that such testing could impact their organization’s sales and revenue. Symantec recommends that enterprises implement disaster recovery testing methods that can be run frequently and without disruption to business operations. Symantec believes that people and processes are the main reason tests fail, pointing to the need for more automation.
Virtualization - A major challenge
61 percent said implementing server virtualization is causing them to reevaluate their disaster recovery plans. 75 per cent of enterprises test virtual environments as part of their disaster recovery initiatives while 73 percent said that data on virtualized systems is regularly backed up. Over half of the respondents cited lack of backup storage capacity and automated recovery tools as top challenges to protecting data in virtual environments.
In addition, the study found that globally, more than half of respondents cited:
· Lack of storage management tools as the top challenge in protecting mission critical data and applications in virtual environments ( 60 percent)
· Resource constraints such as people, budget, and space as the top challenges to backing up virtual machines suggesting a need for greater automation and the ability to leverage existing IT investments in order to lower costs
Recommendations
As demonstrated over multiple years of this study, lack of resources continues to be an issue, yet the costs of downtime are staggering. Enterprises can also do a better job at curbing the costs of downtime by implementing more automation tools that minimize human involvement and address other weaknesses in their disaster recovery plans.
Because disaster recovery testing is invaluable, but can significantly impact business – including customers and revenue – enterprises should seek to improve the success of testing by evaluating and implementing testing methods, which are non-disruptive.
Finally, enterprises should include those responsible for virtualization into disaster recovery plans, especially testing and backup initiatives. Virtual environments should be treated the same as a physical server, showing the need for enterprises to adopt more cross-platform and cross-environment tools, or standardizing on fewer platforms.
Notes to Editor
About the 2009 Symantec Disaster Recovery Research Report
In its fifth year, the 2009 Symantec Disaster Recovery Research report is an annual global study commissioned by Symantec to highlight business trends regarding disaster recovery planning and preparedness. Conducted by independent market research firm Applied Research West during June 2009, the study polled more than 1650 IT managers in large enterprises across 24 countries in the U.S. and Canada, Europe and the Middle East, Asia Pacific and South America to gain insight and understanding into some of the more complicated factors associated with disaster recovery.
About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com.
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