Disaster Recovery remains an afterthought

The research: When Plan B Goes Wrong: Avoiding the Pitfalls of DRaaS surveyed 150 technical and business decision makers from organisations drawn from a wide cross-section of UK enterprises, each employing a minimum of 500 people. The objectives of the research were to establish what DR systems organisations currently have in place, how often plans are tested, and whether enterprises are confident in their ability to recover from disaster as easily and swiftly as possible.

Key Findings Include:

·         65 per cent of contributing organisations had a documented, company-wide DR plan in place.

·         Failures and outages are more common than many people realise. 85 per cent of contributors had experienced failure at some point. Two thirds of that group had experienced the outage within the last 12 months and half of those within 6 months.

·         59 per cent retained a second, separate on-premise data centre for DR purposes.

·         DR testing frequency is very low. 57 per cent are testing only annually or at less frequent intervals. 6 per cent didn’t test their DR at all.

·         Of the organisations testing less frequently, the results of their last test led 44 per cent of them to believe that their DR may be inadequate. 22 per cent encountered issues that would have led to sustained downtime.

·         Those testing more regularly are far more likely to have more ambitious objectives for data recovery than those who test less frequently. 15 per cent expected to recover data in seconds or minutes and 16 per cent actually did so. 61 per cent expected recovery within hours and 62 per cent achieved it.

·         The most frequently encountered problem with failback to original sites is network problems, experienced by 53 per cent.

Commenting on the research findings Sam Woodcock, Senior Director, Cloud Strategy, iland said “The results of the survey lay bare the relatively low priority that DR continues to be given by many organisations despite the prevalence of outages. In most circumstances I think this is based on some misconceptions of what constitutes a disaster. When determining budgets, executives assess the likelihood of datacentres being hit by a plane or falling into a sinkhole and determine, correctly, that the chances of these events actually occurring is very low indeed. However, our research has shown that smaller scale disruptions generated by human error are regular events. 85 per cent of those contributing to our research had had to restore data or services within the last year.”

“Another surprising revelation from the research findings concerns testing. Any reader of this paper is likely to be hyper-aware of the dynamic and fragile nature of technical ecosystems - which makes the finding that more than half of organisations represented in this research are testing annually at best rather worrying.  The results of infrequent testing are predictable. Almost half of those practising infrequent testing fear their DR may be inadequate, which is a classic example of a head-in-the-sand approach. Failure to test DR will, at some point, lead to a recovery failure. It really is only a matter of time.”

“But it’s not all doom and gloom,” concluded Sam Woodcock. “We’re aware that for many organisations DR has the potential to seem every bit as complex as the infrastructure it is protecting and our research has demonstrated that a significant number of businesses are looking for DRaaS solutions to help them manage this complexity – as well as reduce the costs inherent in running a second physical datacentre. DRaaS solutions like our own can help to simplify organisations disaster recovery plans, offering increased flexibility, customised runbook functionality, optimized RPOs, and near-zero RTOs so businesses have more control over their disaster recovery plans.”