According to the research, the annual median budget for disaster recovery initiatives, including backup, recovery, clustering, archiving, spare servers, replication, tape, services, DR plan development and offsite costs at data centres surveyed is US$50 million. According to respondents, this number will continue to grow throughout 2009, but more than half (52 per cent) of respondents believe that budgets will be flat in 2010, making it more challenging for IT management to better leverage their assets including hardware, software and personnel.
Executive involvement doubled in past year
The survey also found that 70 per cent of respondents reported that their DR committees involved the CIO, CTO or IT director, a significant increase from last year's research where 33 per cent of respondents indicated executive involvement.
As budgets increased over the past year, DR initiatives have become more of a competitive differentiator, and impact of downtime on customers is greater than ever, the report observed.
Recommendations
The report makes the following recommendations:
• Organisations can also do a better job at curbing the costs of downtime by implementing more automation tools that minimise human involvement and address other weaknesses in their DR plans.
• Because DR testing is invaluable, but can significantly impact business, including customers and revenue, organisations should seek to improve the success of testing by evaluating and implementing testing methods which are non-disruptive.
• Finally, organisations should include those responsible for virtualisation into DR plans, especially testing and backup initiatives. Virtual environments should be treated the same as a physical server, showing the need for organisations to adopt more cross-platform and cross-environment tools, or standardising on fewer platforms.
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Server virtualization is a popular option for dealing with mounting datacenter costs. Another equally promising approach is the use of an Application Delivery Controller. Citrix NetScaler provides a low-cost way for organizations to reduce their server count and accrue cost savings from a reduction in space, cooling, power and personnel.
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The emergence of WLANs has created a new breed of security threats to enterprise networks.
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