June 30, 2009, 6:14 PM — According to a recent survey, companies are facing greater pressures in the area of disaster recovery. The prospect of the high cost of downtime is putting pressure on disaster recovery staff to deliver, but at the same time, the survey shows that disaster recovery budgets will stay flat after 2009. What's that mean? You're going to have to do more stuff with less money.
According to the results, respondents did make some good progress on reducing recovery times, but at the same time, faced other challenges in the area of disaster recovery testing and in virtualization. And with about 93 percent of respondents have had to execute disaster recovery plans, the survey shows what we all already know--having a disaster recovery plan is a must-have. The cost of unplanned downtime can be enormous, and having a plan can help you get up and running again faster.
Other results show that it takes an average of three hours to get back up to a bare-bones operation after an outage, and four hours to be up and running completely, a marked improvement over the previous year. And good news for those who have trouble getting the big boys to get involved, two thirds reported that the disaster recovery committee involved a CIO, CTO, or IT director.
Many enterprise users are reporting that virtualization has caused their disaster recovery plans to change, although about a third still don't test their virtual environments as part of the disaster recovery strategy, and many don't back up their virtual environments.
That one's a shocker. Why aren't virtual environments being backed up? Primarily, it's because of the lack of automated recovery and storage management tools. Ultimately, the virtual environments need to be backed up just like any other physical server, and on a regular basis.
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