Disaster recovery (DR) is now a boardroom discussion in Indian enterprises. The extent of dent and damage caused by downtime due to natural, manmade and system disasters have made Indian CIOs take a 360" view on mitigation strategies. These are findings of Symantec's fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey. Virus attacks (67 percent) and fear of data loss (51 percent) are the major initiators for DR plans in Indian enterprises. Additionally changes in technology infrastructure (e.g. virtualization, blade computing, etc.) natural disasters, pressures from customers, suppliers, and competition and compliance factors also prompt the Indian enterprises to opt for a disaster recovery plan.
Owing to disasters - 67 percent of Indian enterprises fear loss of data, while 63 percent of the enterprises are concerned about damage to customer loyalty and 49 percent of the enterprises are concerned about damage to competitive standing in the market. The survey also highlights that while recovery time objectives were reduced to 4 hours in 2009, disaster recovery testing and virtualization are still major challenges for enterprises. The average cost of executing/implementing disaster recovery plans for each downtime incident n India can be as high as $105,000, while worldwide it is $287,600. Respondents reported that it takes on average six hours to achieve skeleton operations after an outage, and seven hours to be up and running.
The research shows that Indian enterprises allot 30 percent of their annual IT budget for disaster recovery initiatives, including backup, recovery, clustering, archiving, spare servers, replication, tape, services, disaster recovery plan development and offsite costs at data centers. As the IT budgets for disaster recovery initiatives increase the CIO / CTO / IT director's involvement in DR committee is increasing significantly.
21 percent of Indian enterprises test their DR plans once per year or less frequently. In
addition, one in four tests still fail, showing a dramatic need for
improvement in this area. Reasons most respondents cited for why
enterprises aren't testing include:
Lack of resources in terms of people's time (64 percent)
Disruption to employees (52 percent)
Budget (48 percent)
Disruption to customers (49 percent)
61
percent said implementing server virtualization is causing them to
reevaluate their disaster recovery plans. 75 per cent of enterprises
test virtual environments as part of their disaster recovery
initiatives while 73 percent said that data on virtualized systems is
regularly backed up. Over half of the respondents cited lack of backup
storage capacity and automated recovery tools as top challenges to
protecting data in virtual environments. In addition, the study found that globally, more than half of respondents cited:
Lack
of storage management tools as the top challenge in protecting mission
critical data and applications in virtual environments (60 percent)
Resource
constraints such as people, budget, and space as the top challenges to
backing up virtual machines suggesting a need for greater automation
and the ability to leverage existing IT investments in order to lower
costs
In continuation to Part 2 of this series "How to Take Your Biz Online and Beyond", Abhishek M. Gupta, VP (Technology) of Lime Spot Technology, in Part 3, discusses how to increase traffic by by "affiliate marketing". Read on...
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