USA Leads UK in Disaster Recovery Planning on Virtual and Cloud Platforms

Neverfail Ltd. revealed the results of a survey of nearly 2,500 IT managers and C-level executives from public and private sector organizations in the U.K. and U.S. The results highlight regional differences in approaches to disaster recovery (DR) and IT infrastructure provisioning.

The survey revealed that only 56% of more than 1,000 U.K. respondents had integrated IT DR into their organization’s business continuity plan, while 82.6% had made this move in the U.S. Additionally, respondents in both the U.S. (29.5%) and the U.K. (31.3%) stated that they do not consider cloud platforms to be a viable option for DR, although organizations in the U.S. were ahead of their U.K. counterparts with regards to virtualizing business critical applications. Seventy-two percent of U.S. organizations have made this move in comparison to 58% of U.K. respondents. More details of the results follow.

IT DR and BBC Planning

• Of those companies that had not integrated IT DR into business continuity plans: 45.9% of U.K. respondents did not deem it a business priority – only 22.4% of U.S. respondents shared this view.
• The perceived cost of such technology was the primary deterrent in the U.S. (22.1%), with 18.3% of U.K. respondents also viewing cost as an inhibitor.
• This is interesting considering that 23.4% of U.S. respondents had experienced an IT outage of longer than a full business day, while 18.8% of U.K. respondents had also experienced an outage on this scale.

With 208 businesses in the U.S. and 101 U.K. organizations stating that the hourly cost of downtime is greater than $10,000, IT is not incorporated into DR planning as standard, particularly when considering that 47% of U.S. respondents and 42.4% of those in the U.K. stated that in the event of downtime, they are contacted immediately and incessantly by employees until the problem is resolved.

Virtualization and the Cloud
Virtualization and cloud computing have been two major trends of the past decade, and as virtualization has become more adopted, organizations have increasingly relied on virtual machines to host business applications. More respondents from the U.S. claimed to have migrated mission-critical applications to the cloud.

In fact:

• Seventy-nine percent of those surveyed in the U.S. stated that they operate a heterogeneous IT infrastructure (physical, cloud and virtual), while 55.7% of U.K. respondents had diversified this way.
• Forrester Research has stated that "Internal consolidation and virtualization of data centers is just the beginning for many companies," and with that in mind, the fact that 44.2% of U.S. respondents consider cloud computing to be a viable option for DR when compared to 30.9% of those in the U.K. is perhaps inevitable.
• Of those that did not consider cloud to be a viable DR option (30% U.S. and 37.6% U.K.), key reasons cited for apprehension were lack of confidence in security (34.2% U.S. and 27.4% U.K.), cost (12.6% U.S. and 20.4% U.K.), and lack of confidence in the reliability of externally-hosted DR services (14.9% U.S. and 16.9% U.K.).

Other comparisons between U.S. and U.K.:

• If critical applications fail, reduction in productivity was cited as the main consequence in the U.S. (29.5%), while loss of revenue was top of the list of the U.K. (27.5%).
• Almost 70% of those surveyed in the U.S. stated that users require 24×7 access to critical applications while 42.7% of U.K. respondents also asserted this claim.
• Seventy-six percent of U.S. respondents identify critical applications as part of the business continuity planning process, whereas only 50.3% of those surveyed in the U.K. did this.

"Observing differences in approaches to DR across two geographies has provided great insight into general adoption levels around hot industry trends such as virtualization and cloud computing," said Bob Roudebush, VP of marketing at Neverfail. "Noting that U.S. businesses are slightly ahead of their U.K. counterparts with regards to the virtualization of tier-one applications perhaps signifies more widespread adoption of virtualization generally in this region, and it is also very interesting to see that the concerns around cloud platforms are very similar to the apprehensions and stigma that surrounded virtualization four to five years ago."