Virtualization critical for disaster recovery
A BUMI survey, which polled CEOs, business owners and IT professionals at small- to mid-sized firms, found that 98 percent of respondents felt that more than one day to restore data after an incident was unacceptable even though almost a quarter of respondents did not regularly check the restore process of their data backup operations.
“Backing up your data is only the first step in protecting your organization. What really counts is how quickly and effectively you can recover your information,” said BUMI CEO, Jennifer Walzer.
“A common misconception is that once backups are put into place, you’re all set. Unfortunately, data backup is not a flawless process. Glitches occur and hardware fails. It’s important to routinely test backups so that you can catch problems before they become disasters, but most organizations just don’t have the time or resources,” Walzer added.
A large number of organizations test their restore process infrequently if at all. Nearly 24 percent never test and 17 percent only test yearly. Of the organizations that test more regularly, 27 percent do so quarterly, 19 percent monthly, 12 percent weekly, and less than one percent test on a daily basis.
More than one-third (36%) of respondents have no idea how much an hour of downtime costs their organizations. Of the organizations that were able to place a dollar amount on downtime, 31 percent estimated the cost at thousands of dollars per hour. The rest valued it at hundreds of dollars (26%), hundreds of thousands of dollars (6%), and one million dollars or more (less than 1%), respectively.
Thirty percent of respondents felt that business continuity was the most important consideration in backing up their data. Twenty percent listed disaster recovery as their top priority, while the same number ranked compliance the highest. The remaining participants were mainly concerned with security (16%) and redundancy (13%).
Virtualization is playing a role in many of the survey participants’ disaster recovery methods. Forty-one percent of respondents already use virtualization and 31 percent plan to in the near future. The rest do not currently use virtualization and do not plan to.
“As hardware and software evolve, organizations have become less and less tolerant of downtime, and many are embracing virtualization as a solution,” added Ms. Walzer. “What’s great about virtualization is that you can create a redundant disaster recovery environment much more cost-effectively by reducing hardware and data center costs. For example, ten physical servers in a production environment can be reduced to two in a disaster recovery site.”