Symantec Corp has announced the India findings of its fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey, which demonstrates rising disaster recovery (DR) pressures on enterprises caused by soaring downtime costs and more stringent IT service level requirements to mitigate risks to the business. The study also shows that the DR budgets are higher in 2009 and they are expected to further rise over the next 24 months.
in Indian enterprises. Changes in technology infrastructure (e.g. virtualisation, blade computing and such others) natural disasters, pressures from customers, suppliers, and competition and compliance factors are other major factors that prompt the Indian enterprises to opt for a disaster recovery plan.
Owing to disasters — 67 per cent of Indian enterprises fear loss of data, while 63 per cent of the enterprises are concerned about damage to customer loyalty and 49 per cent of enterprises are concerned about damage to competitive standing in the market.
“Disaster recovery is now a boardroom discussion in Indian enterprises. The extent of dent and damage caused by downtime due to natural, manmade and system disasters and the business continuity issues arising from it have made Indian CIOs take a 360º view on mitigation strategies, said Anand Naik, director, Systems Engineering, Symantec India.
“But as enterprises confront complexities of protecting virtual environments, flat budgets and increasing internal and external risks, disaster recover strategies should be constantly evaluated and upgraded.”
The fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey highlights that while recovery time objectives were reduced to four hours in 2009, disaster recovery testing and virtualisation are still major challenges for enterprises. Respondents report that DR testing increasingly impacts customers and revenue, and one in four tests fail.
The average cost of executing/implementing disaster recovery plans for each downtime incident worldwide according to respondents is $287,600. In India, the median cost can climb to as high as $105,000.
This is alarming when one considers that one in four tests failed and 93 per cent of enterprises have had to execute their disaster recovery plans. Respondents reported that it takes on average six hours to achieve skeleton operations after an outage, and seven hours to be up and running. This is a dramatic improvement over the 2008 findings, where a meagre 26 per cent believed they would have baseline operations within one day.
The research shows that Indian enterprises allot 30 per cent of their annual IT budgets to disaster recovery initiatives, including backup, recovery, clustering, archiving, spare servers, replication, tape, services, disaster recovery plan development and offsite costs at data centers.
Of the respondents, 53 per cent of Indian enterprises are willing to increase their spend on DR budgets over the next 24 months.
Another reason for executive involvement is the increase of applications that are seen as mission critical. 59 per cent of applications were deemed mission critical by respondents, and nearly the same amount is covered in disaster recovery plans. Any outage of these systems will have an enormous impact to the business.
As demonstrated over multiple years of this study, lack of resources continues to be an issue, yet the costs of downtime are staggering. Enterprises can also do a better job at curbing the costs of downtime by implementing more automation tools that minimise human involvement and address other weaknesses in their disaster recovery plans.
Because disaster recovery testing is invaluable, but can significantly impact business - including customers and revenue - enterprises should seek to improve the success of testing by evaluating and implementing testing methods, which are non-disruptive.
Finally, enterprises should include those responsible for virtualisation into disaster recovery plans, especially testing and backup initiatives. Virtual environments should be treated the same as a physical server, showing the need for enterprises to adopt more cross-platform and cross-environment tools, or standardising fewer platforms.
