Traditional Data Recovery Broken – CloudVelox

CloudVelox, Inc., in hybrid cloud DR and migration, announced the results of a survey of 343 IT executives responsible for DR that provides further proof that DR as practiced by most firms is broken.

The results show that organizations test their DR environment annually or less often. Respondents cited process complexity and lack of IT resources as the two biggest reasons for infrequent testing. Further illustrating the difficulty of traditional DR, one in four respondents said they experience failure or delay over half the time when they test their secondary data centers.

Frequent and adequate testing is the cornerstone to effective DR. Overall, 58% of respondents said they test their DR just once per year or less. An additional 33% of respondents said they tested infrequently or never. For these IT pros and the organizations they represent, a minor datacenter outage could become a serious headache, and a major disaster could prove catastrophic. However, there is hope in the form of cloud DR. Unlike traditional DR, cloud DR offers easy and immediate testing, putting these worries at rest.

Cloud has often been disregarded by enterprise IT departments due to a number of perceived network and security concerns, resulting in IT being stereotyped as being against cloud infrastructure. However, this survey tells a different story: 55% of respondents say they would embrace cloud DR as long as they could automate their on-premises network and security controls to the cloud. Thus, most IT pros would prefer cloud DR; their only barrier to adoption is easy migration to the cloud, including migration of network and security controls.

Software-based operating models, such as Pilot Light DR, offer such migration, using hybrid automation to enable customers to move swiftly to the cloud and reducing the cost and complexity associated with a traditional approach.

The survey also indicated that RPOs are less than optimum for traditional DR. Only 21% of respondents said their RPO is less than 2 hours, while 46% said it is from 2-12 hours, and 33% said it is more than 12 hours. Cloud DR solutions can reliably reduce RPO to under one hour, depending on size and availability of bandwidth and the frequency with which the app environment changes.

“This survey shows what we’ve long suspected: traditional DR is broken. The only people doing traditional DR effectively are companies making sizable investments in people and processes. The rest of the market is underserved, and as a result, many organizations have simply given up on DR from a best-practices standpoint,” said Greg Ness, VP of WW marketing, CloudVelox. “But there’s a better way; it’s simply a matter of leveraging robust cloud APIs to automate complex processes and drive higher levels of agility. Hybrid cloud software enables a more agile, reliable approach that makes testing simple and migration fast.”

The 343 survey respondents represented nine different verticals, including oil and gas, basic materials, industrial, consumer goods, consumer services, healthcare, telecommunications, utilities and finance.

For the most part, IT pros from these verticals provided similar responses throughout the survey.

There were a few notable exceptions:

• The oil and gas industry has the highest average RPO, with 70% of respondents stating their RPO took 12 or more hours, including 30% who said it took more than 24 hours.
• The oil and gas industry also tested DR the least frequently, with 80% of respondents saying they test just once a year or less. The healthcare vertical tested the second least-frequently, with 69% testing once a year or less.
• The consumer services and healthcare verticals were most willing to embrace cloud DR provided they could automate network and security controls to the cloud, with 65% of consumer services and 64% of healthcare respondents opting for cloud DR, given automation.