Improving disaster recovery performance is techies' top priority

A survey of IT professionals has revealed that disaster recovery performance has moved to the top of their priority list, with more emphasis being placed on achieving recovery objectives than on simple data protection.

The Topio survey reports that remote (asynchronous) replication will be deployed more than any other solution over the next 12 months, with more than half of respondents saying they intend to implement a disaster recovery program in-house.

Additional survey findings indicate that CDP (continuous data protection), while viewed as a beneficial enabler, is seen by the majority of respondents as lacking clarity of the value proposition. Also, respondents resoundingly indicated they expect CDP to be available as an integrated feature within one of their current tools, rather than as an additional piece of software, which could create additional integration challenges.

The survey reveals a clear shift in thinking among respondents away from a traditional ‘backup/restore’ mentality toward effective disaster recovery, with top emphasis placed on recovery performance. More than half of the respondents said their top priority was to either implement or improve on the time needed to recover key applications and data in the event of a disaster, with almost two-thirds (64 percent) saying they have clearly defined recovery policies and objectives for that information.

While the boardroom is increasingly influencing disaster recovery plans (22 percent said that this was the case), IT staff are still more likely to be the primary driver behind implementation (30 percent) of a corporate disaster recovery plan.

61 percent of all respondents said their companies already have implemented their own remote site as part of a disaster recovery strategy; 24 percent said they are using a third-party provider of such services. Only 10 percent said they have no plans to implement offsite disaster recovery.

Disk-to-disk backup is rivaling tape backup as the preferred method of local data backup and restore; 83 percent of all respondents said they would back up data to disk by the end of next year, while 92 percent said they are still using tape.

•Date: 27th Feb 2006• Region: World • Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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