High DR test failure rate, downtime costs soar: report

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 02 July 2009 13:28

IT Industry - Market

Higher than normal disaster recovery testing failure rates and soaring downtime costs have hit businesses as they work to meet more stringent IT service level requirements and to mitigate risks to their businesses.

With a reported one-in-four disaster recovery tests failing, the average worldwide cost of executing and implementing disaster recovery plans for each downtime incident is US$287,600, but in Australia and New Zealand it’s significantly higher than the global average, at US$570,000, although much lower than in North America where it’s US$900,000.

Healthcare and financial services organisations experienced the highest DR costs globally.

According to Symantec in its latest DR survey, while recovery time objectives were reduced to less than four hours in 2009, disaster recovery testing and virtualisation were still major challenges for organisations.
 
“Respondents report that DR testing increasingly impacts customers and revenue, and one in four tests fail. Nearly a third of organisations 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.”

Symantec says that the soaring costs of DR to business is alarming “when one considers that one in four tests failed and 93 per cent of organisations have had to execute on their disaster recovery plans.”

The Symantec report also reveals that respondents reported that it takes on average three hours to achieve skeleton operations after an outage, and four hours to be up and running, which the security firm says is dramatically improved over the 2008 findings where only three per cent of respondents reported that they could achieve skeleton operations within 12 hours, and 31 per cent believed they would have baseline operations within one day.
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