Business Continuity A Big Spend In 2007?
Business Continuity A Big Spend In 2007?
January 3, 2007: According to research undertaken by TheInfoPro, the business continuity budgets of almost half the Fortune 1000 and US midsized organisations are due to expand in 2007.
The study released by the independent IT research network revealed that for 47 percent of organisations surveyed, spending for business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) and remote replication and data mirroring initiatives is due to increase over the coming year.
But that leaves 53 percent of organisations with no intention to increase their spend on business continuity over the course of 2007. Of these, 43 percent revealed they do not intend to change their business continuity spending while 10 percent suggested they intended to lower their BC budgets. These results could raise some levels of concern over the disaster recovery plans of some organisations.
However, TIP views these results as a positive indicator on the planning initiatives of those surveyed. To prove their confidence in BC/DR initiatives, the research group cites the finding that 75 percent of the organisations interviewed have a formal business continuity programme in place.
“Business Continuity planning has again taken centre stage in the list of priorities with the Fortune 1000 and midsized enterprises,” says Myron Kerstetter, a managing director at TheInfoPro. “Organisations have placed Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective times, together with application tiering, as the key aspects of BC/DR planning and monitoring.”
For many organisations, the lack of change or lowered spending on disaster recovery could stem from the fact that they have made significant boosts to their systems in recent years. “In 2006, we implemented SAP and a total infrastructure to support it,” said one interviewee when asked why there would be no change in business continuity spending. “Sixty percent of out infrastructure was change, along with DR portions of the infrastructure.”
Meanwhile only half of those interviewed said that an economic business analysis was completed in connection with their business continuity initiatives. However, risk analysis’ appeared to be more popular with 66 percent revealing they had undertaken a risk analysis as part of establishing a direction and strategy for BC/DR.
Leading the list of significant barriers to doing BC/DR effectively was the availability of resources for implementation followed by the cost of extended and/or replicated Servers and Storage. Almost 40 percent of interviewees cited the availability of resources as a significant hurdle along the road towards BC/DR. Interviewees indicated that these results come down to the cost of people’s time and the ability of staffing resources to undertake the work. Some interviewees revealed that how much hardware and networking their organisations actually required for BC/DR became quite an ‘eye opener.’
In terms of data protection techniques, TIP found that backup led the charge amongst the interviewees followed by replication, snapshot and synchronous. CDO and virtual tape rated significantly lower then the other data protection techniques.
TheInfoPro conducted the study through hour-long interviews with 91 members of their own TIPNetwork, a pre-screened group of IT professionals across both Fortune 1000 organisations and midsized enterprises.