When it comes to safeguarding information systems availability against disaster, companies feel more secure when they turn to an outsourcer rather than handling it in-house, according to a new study ‘Optimizing Business Performance Requires Optimizing Information Availability Investments,’ by IDC.

The report states that companies which "outsource gain considerable advantage by leveraging a third-party provider which can offer its scale of economy in buying power for procuring capital and operational requirements as well as gain access to a BCDR (business continuity / disaster recovery) service model that enables greater assurance of lowering downtime and increasing availability."

"Our study found outsourcing information availability can help enterprises ensure people, systems and information stay connected, and the ability to maintain business processes in an 'always-on' world," said David Tapper, program director, IT Outsourcing & Utility Services at IDC and author of the report.

"Additionally, the study highlighted how companies are looking to gain access to newer models of service delivery that help them keep pace with changes in availability requirements."

Research highlights include:

Sourcing preferences
Survey respondents indicated a strong preference for using a hosting service which had an integrated recovery capability (59 percent). Other preferences were a hosting service with no recovery service (17.9 percent); managed hosting service with integrated recovery services (15.4 percent) and full-scale outsourcing (7.7 percent). According to Mr. Tapper, "This preference indicates how companies prefer to leverage an outsourced model in which they retain significant control over the IT assets and IT staff, but transfer control of the management for provisioning BCDR services for their IT environments as well as managing the facilities hosting these environments."

Recovery ratings
On average, companies using an in-house strategy rated their recovery capability lower than if outsourced. According to Mr. Tapper, "This lower rating reinforces customer expectation that an outsourced strategy provides a greater level of assurance and probability that a company's availability requirements can be ensured."

Emerging technologies
Survey respondents said they plan to increase investment in new business continuity and disaster recovery technologies and services more than five-fold from 2005 to 2006. The investments include a range of technologies (grid, virtualization, clustering, load balancing, Service Oriented Architecture, storage area networks and flash copy) and service models (online archival and hosting applications with built-in recovery).

•Date: 14th July 2006• Region: US/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
Rate this article or make a comment - click here