Ransomware plagues the data centre

The State of Enterprise Data Resiliency and Disaster Recovery 2019 study was developed to identify what DR solutions businesses currently utilize, their confidence in those solutions and how effective the solutions are at helping businesses return to normal operations following a disaster, in addition to the key capabilities IT teams consider when evaluating and selecting a DR solution to create their DR plan.

"This research confirms that ransomware is one of the biggest concerns for IT managers today," said Tim Page, CEO of Datrium. "This threat is significantly driving people to reevaluate their DR plans. It's no surprise that more than 88% of respondents said they’d use the public cloud for their DR site if they could pay for it only when they need to test or run their DR plans.”

Ransomware is Plaguing the Enterprise Data Centre

As the nucleus of an enterprise, the data centre must be protected from the threat of disaster or deliberate attacks. Half (50.4%) of all organizations surveyed have recently experienced a DR event, with ransomware reported as the leading cause.

• Over 36% of those who experienced a DR event identified ransomware as the primary cause, with power outages (26.1%) the second most common disaster organizations experience, followed by natural disasters (16.6%).
• When asked why the ability to respond quickly to a disaster has become more important, nearly three-quarters (70.1%) of respondents noted the increasing threat of ransomware.

Traditional Approaches to DR Put Organizations at Risk

Traditional DR approaches are lacking. Two significant challenges faced by more than half of organizations who experienced a DR event in the past 24 months were the difficulty of both failover to their DR location and failback.

The top three reasons why failback was difficult included difficulty with format conversion, the amount of time required to failback and challenges in understanding changes in the system since failover.

• More than 54% of respondents said VMs had been converted to cloud native formats and it was difficult to convert back to a VMware vSphere format.
• Over 52% said the amount of time required to failback was difficult.
• More than 47% claimed it was difficult to understand the incremental changes that had occurred in the system since failover.

Pay-for-Use DR in the Public Cloud is in High Demand

The industry norm today is to have physical sites for DR, however the industry is shifting toward DR in the public cloud. The vast majority (88.1%) of respondents said they would use the public cloud as their DR site if they would only have to pay for it when they need it. The most common approach to DR according to more than half (52.7%) of respondents is having more than one physical DR site.

"As companies weigh the best defence options against ransomware, they should consider the benefits of using the public cloud for their DR sites. They can counter the high costs of traditional DR solutions and free their IT staff to focus on revenue-generating initiatives. The public cloud offers lower management overhead and costs along with lower risk and higher reliability in testing and executing DR plans," added Page.

Nearly one in four respondents (23%) stated that their organization is not responding to DR events as effectively as it could be. The top three considerations holding organizations back from responding to DR events include: 1) the complexity of DR products and processes, 2) high associated costs and 3) lack of staff skilled in managing DR.

Growing Threat of Disaster Increases DR Budgets

Given the growing threat of disasters, DR budgets are significantly increasing.

• Three-quarters (74.9%) of respondents stated that their DR budget has increased over the past 12 months, and 21% reported that the increase was significant.
• Only 1% of respondents noted a decrease in DR budget.
• In light of growing threats, nearly three-quarters of IT leaders expect their DR budget to increase in the next 24 months.

“It's our mission to bring enterprise-grade DR to every IT team by cutting cost and complexity with an on-demand failproof model leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS,” said Page. “Today, Datrium also announced new Disaster Recovery as a Service capabilities that provide VMware users, both on premises and in the cloud, a reliable, cost-effective cloud-based disaster recovery solution with the industry’s first instant Recovery Time Objective (RTO) restarts.”