SYDNEY: Symantec Corp last week announced the global results of its fifth annual Disaster Recovery Survey, which demonstrates rising DR pressures on organisations caused by soaring downtime costs and more stringent IT service level requirements to mitigate risk to business. 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 (RTOs) were reduced to less than four hours in 2009, disaster recovery testing and virtualisation are still big challenges for organisations. Respondents report that DR testing increasingly impacts on customers and revenue, and one in four tests fail. Nearly a third of organisations do not test virtual environments as part of their disaster recovery plans, and a slightly larger percentage of virtual environments are not regularly backed up – pointing to the need for more automation and cross-environment tools.
The average cost of executing/implementing disaster recovery plans for each downtime incident worldwide is $US287,600 ($358,500). In Australia and New Zealand, the median cost is $US570,000 compared with $US900,000 in the US. Globally, the number is highest for healthcare and financial services organisations.
This is alarming, given that one in four tests failed and 93 per cent of organisations have had to execute on their disaster-recovery plans. 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 dramatically improved over the 2008 findings, where only 3 per cent reported that they could achieve skeleton operations within 12 hours, and 31 per cent believed they would have baseline operations within one day.
As demonstrated over multiple years of this study, lack of resources continues to be an issue, yet the costs of downtime are staggering. However, organisations can 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 disaster recovery plans.
“While some aspects in implementing disaster recover plans are trending well, the impact of downtime is greater than ever before,” said Symantec Storage and Availability Management Group vice president Rob Soderbery. “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 disaster recovery 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.”
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