A vast number of organisations are turning to cloud-based recovery solutions, with this route emerging as the fastest-growing form of recovery expanding at a rate of 30% annually1. Yet there is evidence to suggest the majority are still leaving themselves exposed to the risk of considerable data loss.
The Disaster Recovery Council’s 2014 annual bench marking report reveals 75% of all businesses are failing to prepare adequately for disaster recovery. One in four organisations had lost data for one day or more, and 20% of all organisations reported the cost of losing data ranged from a relatively trifling $50k up to $5m.
Any high profile, poorly managed incident – from technology failure to a PR scandal – can cause a company’s share price to plummet knocking millions off its value – as we have seen with Carphone Warehouse, BP after the Deepwater Horizon disaster and, most recently, Volkswagen.
With Gartner calculating that spend on disaster recovery products amounts to some $19bn a year globally, it is clear organisations are spending record amounts to mitigate the risk without achieving the outcomes they seek. This suggests firms are “throwing money at the problem” rather than investing their precious resources wisely.
In our experience, a lack of planning, resources and time to test are the main causes of DR failure. As an organisation changes over time, it inevitably creates a complex hybrid IT infrastructure comprising legacy IT, physical and virtual machines, hosted applications and cloud computing environments. This is where many cloud-based recovery solutions fall down as they are typically focused on a narrow range of environments rather than the multi-platform environments that are more typical of production IT systems.
This is exacerbated by a lack of planning that means organisations do not precisely know what their production IT estate looks like in terms of dependencies, and what needs to be recovered in what order and when. Against this backdrop, it is easy to understand how IT executives fall into the trap of buying point solutions that recover some of their platforms – but by no means all of their IT infrastructure.
Recognising that this definitely is not an area where ‘one size fits all’, we offer you expert advice to match the right cloud recovery option from our comprehensive portfolio to your actual business needs.
We can help you tier applications by their criticality to the business, with the most important having instant failover or fast recovery while secondary applications can take a little longer to recover.
In this way, we are able to help you make the best use of finite resources.
To learn more about any of our cloud-based recovery services visit our website, call your account manager or email avail@sungardas.com.
1 Source: Gartner May 2015