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Symantec Corp. announced the global results of its fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery

July 2009 by Symantec

Symantec Corp. announced the global results of its fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey which demonstrates rising DR pressures on organizations caused by soaring downtime
costs and more stringent IT service level requirements to mitigate risk to the
business. 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 4 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.

Downtime costs are significant
The average cost of executing/implementing disaster recovery plans for each downtime
incident worldwide according to respondents is US $287,600. In North America, the
median cost can climb to as high as $900,000. Globally, this number is highest for
healthcare and financial services organizations. In North America, the median cost
for financial institutions is $650,000.

This is alarming when one considers that one in four tests failed and 93 percent of
organizations have had to execute on their disaster recovery plans. Respondents
reported that it takes on average three hours to achieve skeleton operations after
an outage, and four hours to be up and running. This is dramatically improved over
the 2008
findings
where only three percent of respondents reported that they could achieve skeleton
operations within 12 hours, and 31 percent believed they would have baseline
operations within one day.

2009 DR spending bucks trend

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 $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.

Executive involvement doubled in past year

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
downtown on customers is greater than ever. Another reason for executive involvement
is the increase of applications that are seen as mission critical. Sixty percent 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.

Disaster recovery testing improves but still a major challenge

This year, 35 percent of respondents reported that they test their DR plans once per
year or less frequently – a 12 percent improvement from last year. In addition,
one in four tests still fail, showing a dramatic need for improvement in this area.
Reasons most respondents cited for why organizations aren’t testing include:

* Lack of resources in terms of people’s time (48 percent)
* Disruption to employees (44 percent)
* Budget (44 percent)
* Disruption to customers (40 percent)

Also a concern is that more organizations reported that disaster recovery testing
increasingly impacts customers and revenue over previous years. Forty percent of
respondents reported that disaster recovery testing will impact their
organizations’ customers and nearly one third (27 percent) reported that such
testing could impact their organization’s sales and revenue. Symantec recommends
that organizations implement disaster recovery testing methods that can be run
frequently and without disruption to business operations. Symantec believes that
people and processes are the main reason tests fail, pointing to the need for more
automation.

Virtualization still a major challenge

Sixty-four percent of worldwide respondents reported that virtualization is causing
them to reevaluate their disaster recovery plans. This is up from 55 percent in
2008. Still, nearly a third (27 percent) of organizations do not test virtual
environments as part of their disaster recovery initiatives. This number has
improved in the past year, lowering from more than one-third (35 percent) of
organizations who did not test in 2008. Additionally, more than one-third (36
percent) of data on virtualized systems is not regularly backed up, showing no
improvement in the past year (37 percent in 2008). Over half of the respondents
cited lack of backup storage capacity and automated recovery tools as top challenges
to protecting data in virtual environments.

In addition, the study found that globally, more than half of respondents cited:

· Lack of storage management tools as the top challenge in protecting
mission critical data and applications in virtual environments (53 percent)

· Resource constraints such as people, budget, and space as the top
challenges to backing up virtual machines suggesting a need for greater automation
and the ability to leverage existing IT investments in order to lower costs (51
percent)

Recommendations

As demonstrated over multiple years of this study, lack of resources continues to be
an issue, yet the costs of downtime are staggering. Organizations can also do a
better job at curbing the costs of downtime by implementing more automation tools
that minimize 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 – organizations should seek to
improve the success of testing by evaluating and implementing testing
methods<https://www4.symantec.com/Vrt/offer...> which are non-disruptive.

Finally, organizations should include those responsible for virtualization into
disaster recovery plans, especially testing and backup initiatives. Virtual
environments should be treated the same as a physical server, showing the need for
organizations to adopt more cross-platform and cross-environment tools, or
standardizing on fewer platforms.

“This year’s Symantec-sponsored research clearly identifies key issues, hidden
risks and best practices in implementing DR. While some aspects are trending well,
the impact of downtime is greater than ever before,” said Rob Soderbery, senior
vice president of Symantec’s Storage and Availability Management Group. “The
surging cost of downtime places greater emphasis on business – which means more
pressure on IT. If organizations are not protecting virtual environments, not
testing their DR plans and seeing one out every four tests fail then something needs
to change to better manage risk to the business. Organizations should implement
solutions that address these needs while allowing them to leverage existing
assets.”


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