Insufficient Testing and Lack of Coordination of DR Plans

Vision Solutions, Inc. has released its State of Resilience report.

The third annual executive overview provides an analysis of new and existing technologies IT professionals are employing to protect their critical information and ensure business continuity. The global year-long study focused on responses from 6,488 technical professionals and executives that manage or oversee Windows, IBM AIX, IBM i, IBM z/OS, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, and other operating environments.

"Fundamental shifts are underway as businesses of all sizes seek to deploy virtualisation and cloud infrastructures to improve business performance," says Edward Vesely, Vision Solutions’ senior vice president of marketing. "As businesses adopt these infrastructures, research in this report indicates they’re also shifting from tape backup to more efficient and flexible technologies including software replication, software replication plus failover, and CDP to protect their systems."

"As we analyse how resilient companies are, we are also examining how they are managing this transition from the present to the future," said Vesely. "It’s a story of resilience in the face of change."  

Notable findings from the survey include:

• Virtualisation technology: Virtualisation is now well embedded in many IT organisations. (77% report virtual servers deployed, and 12% report plans to deploy.) Improved high availability and disaster recovery was cited as a third most popular benefit of virtualisation for survey respondents, behind flexibility (faster deployment of physical servers and applications) and reduced investment in physical servers. Clearly, companies of all sizes are now beginning to realise the benefit of their virtualisation efforts.  
• Disaster recovery confidence and concerns: Despite steps that companies take to decrease risk in their IT systems, most professionals said their organisations were still vulnerable. Insufficient testing and lack of coordination of disaster recovery plans across the organisation were cited as key concerns.
• Early-stage technology: Many organisations appear to be driving in the direction of cloud computing as a means to improve data centre efficiency, flexibility and disaster recovery. Over a third of the companies surveyed (35%) have adopted or plan to adopt public or private clouds within the next year for a variety of reasons: reduced costs, better services, and simplification of IT management across the business.
• Data protection technologies: Tape backup still plays a major role in organisations’ data protection strategies. However, disaster recovery surveys conducted in February 2010 and August 2010, showed a drop in the predominance of tape/offsite backup, from 87% in February to 80% in August. The survey also shows an increase in the use of clustering as a data protection technology: 26% in February 2010, as compared to 30% in August 2010.

To download a copy of the report (you need to register)