Research From iland Shows a Lack of Focus on Disaster Recovery
iland recently released the findings of its research into the disaster recovery readiness of businesses. The study revealed that less than two-thirds of organizations surveyed have a documented company-wide disaster recovery plan in place. Additionally, a comparatively small number of respondents rely on the cloud for their replication, which suggests that the move to DRaaS and the cloud has been a slow process among larger enterprises.
The study, called When Plan B Goes Wrong: Avoiding the Pitfalls of DRaaS, surveyed 150 technical and business decision-makers from businesses spanning a wide cross-section of UK organizations, each with a minimum of 500 employees. The goal of the study was to establish what disaster recovery systems companies currently have in place, how often plans are tested, and if organizations are confident in their disaster recovery strategies.
iland is a global cloud services provider. The vendor offers secure and compliant hosting for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), and Backup as a Service (BaaS). iland provides cloud services from its data centers located throughout the Americas, Europe, Australia, and Asia. In the past year, iland has added new fully managed support offerings and expanded the platforms it can support through the use of additional service delivery partners. The vendor’s DRaaS solution, iland Secure DRaaS, allows for replication from virtual and physical environments.
Key findings of the study include:
- 65 percent of those surveyed had a documented, company-wide disaster recovery plan in place.
- 85 percent of contributes had experienced a failure or outage at some point, and two-thirds of that group had experienced an outage within the last 12 months. Half of those outages occurred within the last six months.
- 59 percent of respondents retained a second, separate on-prem data center for recovery purposes.
- The frequency of disaster recovery testing is low. 57 percent are only testing annually, or even less frequently. 6 percent did not test their disaster recovery plan at all.
- Of the businesses testing less often, the results of their last test led 44 percent of them to believe their recovery strategy is inadequate. 22 percent faced issues that would have led to extended downtime.
- The enterprises testing more regularly are more likely to have more ambitious goals for data recovery than those that test less often. 15 percent expected to recover data in seconds of minutes and 16 percent actually did so. Additionally, 61 percent expected recovery within hours and 62 percent did so.
- The most common problem with failback to original sites is network problems, experienced by 53 percent of respondents.
In a press statement, Sam Woodcock, Senior Director of Cloud Strategy at iland, said, “the results of the survey lay bare the relatively low priority that DR continues to be given by many organizations 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 data centers 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 percent of those contributing to our research had to restore data or services within the last year.”
Woodcock continued, stating, “the results of infrequent testing are predictable. Almost half of those practicing 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.”
Read When Plan B Goes Wrong: Avoiding the Pitfalls of DRaaS here.
To learn more about iland, click here.