Peter Dinham
Thursday, 02 July 2009 14:28
IT Industry -
Market
Page 1 of 3
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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