65% of Respondents Use Manual DR Processes

FalconStor Software, Inc. announced the results of its independent DR Trends and Metrics quick poll, which was conducted in partnership with IDG Research Services.

Featuring responses from 189 IT managers and executives, the survey found that 42% are still not adequately armed with modern DR solutions, even though they experienced at least one instance of data loss in the past year.

Many of those surveyed continue to rely on ineffective manual processes and tape backup systems; however, most respondents anticipate an evolutionary move toward highly available, automated systems with data replication within the next 18 months.

"In conducting this survey, we found it surprising that participating companies experienced an average of 34 instances of data loss and IT outages; even with this level of system failure, DR testing was not a priority for these businesses," said Janet King, GM and VP at IDG Research Services. "This poll illustrates why companies must remain vigilant on the topic of data protection by implementing automated solutions that eliminate unexpected losses."

The survey also found that tape backup was the most pervasive data backup solution, with 23% of large enterprises, 48% of medium enterprises and 27% of small businesses relying on this technology.

Additional survey findings include:

• 65% of respondents reported using manual DR processes; however, 83% reported that they believe automated DR and data replication technologies will be more widely used in the next 18 months.
• 72% of overall IT leaders stated that their DR plans are only tested an average of once a year, with 82% of large enterprises completing DR testing one or more times yearly as compared to 75% of medium enterprises and 63% of small businesses.
• 42% of respondents said their organizations experience at least one data outage per year, with an average of 34 instances across enterprises of all sizes; of these companies, the majority of respondents stated that downtime in excess of four hours for any outage is unacceptable.
• 53% of organizations responded that an outage of more than four hours is unacceptable, with the most common consequence being loss of productivity as reported by 67%, followed by 27% reporting harm to reputation, financial loss and loss of irreplaceable data.

Driven by decreased IT budgets and the conventional perception of DR as a manual, time-intensive process, IT has not quickly adopted new automated solutions. Data protection and DR technology is an insurance policy for today’s data centers, which must be able to operate 24/7 without IT downtime. In part, the delay in adopting these automated service-oriented recovery technologies lies in the education of the market and the executives who must approve these new systems.

"As demonstrated recently by Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the Northeast, businesses must have a plan in place to quickly restore both data and IT services to curb the cost of downtime. With the increased adoption of virtualization and the extraordinary amount of time required for tape backup, companies are turning to disk-based solutions," said Ralph Wynn, senior product marketing manager at FalconStor. "Through the use of highly available automation technologies and consistent DR testing, firms can be assured that they are prepared to handle any issue that may arise."

FalconStor’s RecoverTrac automated DR solution was chosen as the SearchServerVirtualization Best of VMworld 2012 award gold winner in the BC and Data Protection category for its ability to perform service-oriented recovery in mixed physical/virtual environments and for enabling continuous data protection. By automating the complex recovery process, RecoverTrac technology eliminates the costly, time-consuming task of manually bringing IT services back on line and provides IT managers with the ability to resume services quickly.

Study demographics
The online poll conducted by IDG Research collected information from 189 IT leaders across all market segments that were using or planning to use DR and data protection technologies. 32% of these individuals worked at firms with more than 5,000 employees; 23% of these individuals had between 1,001 and 5,000 employees; 37% of these individuals had between 101 and 1,000 employees; and 8% had between 50 and 100 employees at the time of the survey.