IT disaster recovery under the spotlight
- Details
- Published: Friday, 03 April 2015 14:16
More than three in ten IT professionals report that their organization has suffered a major incident that has required them to implement disaster recovery procedures, according to a technology survey conducted by Evolve IP. The survey also shows that of those experiencing a major incident, 11 percent experienced permanent IT losses. Additionally, educational institutions lag behind commercial businesses with just 25 percent noting that they feel very prepared to handle a major IT disaster.
The survey shows that the leading causes of incidents are hardware outages, noted by 47 percent of respondents. 34 percent of those surveyed sited environmental disasters, 27.5 percent indicated power outages and nearly two in 10 indicated human error. Of those that have experienced a major incident, 44 percent have experienced multiple disasters in the past five years with 17 percent experiencing three or more disasters.
Perhaps surprisingly, a significant number of organizations continue to use legacy methods for disaster recovery. Forty five percent of those surveyed continue to use backup tapes and 41.5 percent use additional servers at their primary site as a principal method for disaster recovery.
Organizations that are using a DRaaS service ultimately feel the most confident to handle a disaster with 66 percent noting they feel ‘very prepared’ to handle a major incident as compared to just 31.5 percent of those that do not.
Additional findings:
- Less than half of those surveyed (45.5 percent) believe they are very prepared to recover their IT assets in the event of a disaster.
- Respondents in organizations with compliance requirements are more confident with their disaster recovery systems with 54 percent feeling very prepared.
- Forty six percent of government organizations indicated that their secondary data center/centre was less than 25 miles from their main site.
- Thirteen percent of respondents reported that they rely on the public cloud for their disaster recovery implementation
- Of those that experienced a major incident, more than half have lost data with 12 percent losing more than a day’s worth of data.
- Four in 10 respondents feel that their disaster recovery budget is underfunded.
Survey methodology
Evolve IP conducted a blind, web-based survey during December, 2014 with 2084 IT professionals and executives. 53.5 percent were from organizations with between 100 – 2,000 employees; 25 percent were from organizations with between 11 – 99 employees; 17 percent came from organizations with more than 2,000 employees and 5 percent were from organizations with between 1 – 10 employees.
