Organisations face rising disaster recovery pressures

Organisations are facing rising disaster recovery (DR) pressures caused by soaring downtime costs and more stringent IT service level requirements to mitigate risk to the business.

This is the conclusion of a global study (the fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey) by security, storage and systems management solutions company, Symantec. The survey was conducted by independent market research firm Applied Research West last month. It polled more than 1,650 IT managers in large organisations across 24 countries in the US and Canada, Europe and the Middle East, Asia Pacific and South America.

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The study also shows that while DR budgets are higher in 2009, they are expected to remain flat over the next few years, requiring IT professionals to do more with the same or less.

The survey highlights that while recovery time objectives were reduced to four hours in 2009, DR testing and virtualisation are still major challenges for organisations.

According to the report, this year, 35 per cent of respondents reported that they test their DR plans once per year or less frequently, a 12 per cent improvement from last year. Forty per cent of respondents reported that DR testing will impact their organisations' customers and nearly one third (27 per cent) reported that such testing could impact their organisation's sales and revenue.

Sixty-four per cent of worldwide respondents reported that virtualisation is causing them to re-evaluate their DR plans. This is up from 55 per cent in 2008.

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 (53 per cent).

• 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 (51 per cent).

"This year's Symantec-sponsored research clearly identifies key issues, hidden risks and best practices in implementing DR. While some aspects are faring well, the impact of downtime is greater than ever before," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of Symantec's storage and availability management group. "The surging cost of downtime places greater emphasis on business, which means more pressure on IT. If organisations are not protecting virtual environments, not testing their DR plans and seeing one out of every four tests fail, then something needs to change to better manage risk to the business. Organisations should implement solutions that address these needs while allowing them to leverage existing assets."

Downtime costs are significant

The average cost of executing/implementing DR plans for each downtime incident worldwide according to respondents is US$287,600. In North America, the median cost can climb to as high as US$900,000. Globally, this number is highest for healthcare and financial services organisations. In North America, the median cost for financial institutions is US$650,000.

This is alarming when one considers that one in four tests failed and 93 per cent of organisations have had to execute on their disaster recovery plans, said Symantec.

2009 DR spending bucks trend