Virtualisation drives disaster recovery planning
Virtualisation drives disaster recovery planning
September 16, 2008: As more applications and data are managed in a virtual environment, organisations are being forced to reevaluate disaster recovery plans.
According to a survey commissioned by Symantec, nearly one-third of global organisations and 20 percent of Australian organisations, have had to implement part of their DR plan due to a computer system failure.
The study polled more than 1000 IT managers in large organisations across 15 countries, finding that there appears to be improvement in successful disaster recovery testing. One-third of global respondents (12 percent in Australia) indicate testing will impact their customers, and one-fifth globally (12 percent in Australia) admit such testing could negatively affect their organisation’s sales and revenue.
With the increase in the number of mission-critical applications, it becomes difficult for organisations with flat IT budgets to maintain availability. As a result, companies should look at more cost effective ways to protect applications including reducing spare servers, increasing server capacity, looking at physical to virtual configurations, and more.
Disaster recovery plans are not documents collecting dust on shelves. In the past year, one-third of organisations surveyed had to execute their disaster recovery plans.Virtualisation is the major factor that is causing more than half of respondents globally to reevaluate their DR plans. According to Symantec, native DR tools in virtual environments are immature and don’t provide the enterprise-class protection that organisations require.
The survey found that 35 percent (30 percent in Australia) of virtual servers are not currently covered in organisations’ DR plans, only 37 percent (50 percent in Australia) of respondents reported that they back up all of their virtual systems.
According to survey data, while having a disaster recovery plan is essential in most organisations today, knowing that disaster recovery plans work is equally important. However, respondents report that 30 percent (34percent in Australia) of tests fail to meet recovery time objectives (RTOs) with an average global RTO of 9.54 hours and 14.67 hours for Australia.
Respondents also reported the top reasons why their tests failed include: human error (35 percent globally, 18 percent in Australia); technology failure (29 percent globally, 18 percent in Australia); insufficient IT infrastructure (25 percent globally, 16 percent in Australia); out-of-date plans (24 percent globally, 10 percent in Australia) and inappropriate processes (23 percent globally, 10 percent in Australia). Since human error is one of the greatest problem hindering successful recoveries, organisations should look to automation that will speed recovery and reduce errors and reliance on personnel.
“While the research identifies a significant improvement in DR testing in the industry, we are concerned that organisations are not testing more frequently to improve their plans, and are not using adequate tools to reduce the overall business impact,” said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president of Symantec’s Veritas Cluster Server Group.
“Virtualsation is obviously changing the game for disaster recovery and organisations should involve IT executives in the process of reevaluating their DR plans and then implement best practices and solutions that ensure confidence in a successful and rapid return to full operations in the event of a disaster.”