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Organizations are facing rising DR pressures caused by soaring downtime costs and more stringent IT service level requirements to mitigate risk to the business, according to Symantec’s global results of its fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey. The study also shows that while DR budgets are higher in 2009, they are expected to remain flat over the next few years - requiring IT professionals to do more with the same or less. The survey highlights that while recovery time objectives were reduced to four hours in 2009, disaster recovery testing and virtualization are still major challenges for organizations. Respondents report that DR testing increasingly impacts customers and revenue, and one in four tests fail. Nearly a third of organizations don't test virtual environments as part of their disaster recovery plans, and a slightly larger percentage of virtual environments aren't regularly backed up - pointing to the need for more automation and cross-environment tools. The research shows that the annual median budget for disaster recovery initiatives, including backup, recovery, clustering, archiving, spare servers, replication, tape, services, disaster recovery plan development and offsite costs at data centers surveyed is US$50 million. According to respondents, this number will continue to grow throughout 2009, but more than half (52 percent) of respondents believe that budgets will be flat in 2010, making it more challenging for IT management to better leverage their assets including hardware, software and personnel. According to the 2009 disaster recovery survey, 70 percent of respondents reported that their disaster recovery committees involved the CIO, CTO or IT director - a significant increase from last year's research where 33 percent of respondents indicated executive involvement. As budgets increased over the past year, disaster recovery initiatives have become more of a competitive differentiator, and impact of downtime on customers is greater than ever. Another reason for executive involvement is the increase of applications that are seen as mission critical. Sixty per cent of applications were deemed mission critical by respondents, and nearly the same amount is covered in disaster recovery plans. Any sort of outage to these systems will have an enormous impact to the business. "This year's Symantec-sponsored research clearly identifies key issues, hidden risks and best practices in implementing DR," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group. "While some aspects are trending well, the impact of downtime is greater than ever before. The surging cost of downtime places greater emphasis on business - which means more pressure on IT.” |
