Symantec has released the results of their Disaster Recovery survey this week, which highlights a strong growth in recovery operations but at the same time shows that while DR budgets are higher in 2009, they are expected to remain flat over the next few years. As always seems the case in IT, this means that IT teams will have to do more with the same or less.
Symantec releases Disaster Recovery survey results. (IMG: Symantec)
One of the standout points in the survey results, which included 1,650 responses worldwide from companies with 5,000 or more employees globally, is that disaster recovery testing and virtualization are still major challenges. Respondents told Symantec that disaster recovery testing increasingly impacts customers and revenue, and one in four tests fail. This fact is frightening when you consider that 93 percent of those surveyed said they have had to execute on their disaster recovery plans. Yet, one in four tests failed.
Nearly a third of organizations don’t test virtual environments as part of their DRPs (disaster recovery plans), and a slightly larger percentage of virtual environments aren’t regularly backed up. This, Symantec says, points to a need for more automation and cross-environmental and platform related tools. Testing overall, Symantec said, has improved but it’s still a bit of a challenge.
This year, 35 percent of respondents reported that they test their DRPs once per year or less frequently, that’s a 12 percent jump from 2008. Reasoning listed for no testing include 48 percent reporting a lack of resources in terms of people’s time, 44 percent said testing causes a disruption to employees, 44 percent claimed budget issues, and 40 percent said its disruptive to customers.
One of the key things to a successful DRP is testing. It does no good to create DRP policy and once needed discover it’s useless because of lack of testing. Testing a DRP is one of the reasons for updating it, as you work out kinks in the plan and adjust accordingly. It also makes no sense to halt testing, considering the estimated cost of downtime in the U.S. is $287,600 USD. In North America, the median cost can climb to as high as $900,000 USD.
Recovery, however, has improved a good deal. Respondents reported that it takes on average three hours to achieve skeleton operations after an outage, and four hours to be up and running. This is huge improvement over the 2008 findings, where only three percent of respondents reported skeleton operations within 12 hours, and 31 percent believed they would have baseline operations within one day.
Virtually speaking, 64 percent of worldwide respondents reported that virtualization is causing them to reevaluate their disaster recovery plans. However, as mentioned, virtualization isn’t tested.
Resource constraints such as people, budget, and space as the top challenges to backing up virtual machines (51 percent) and lack of storage management tools (53 percent), were listed as reasons for the lack of testing when it comes to virtual DRPs. While Symantec has tools for this, there are countless vendors and software options online for these types of environments.
The results in full can be viewed here.
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