Plan B’s latest disaster recovery report provides some insights into changes in the way organizations manage their DR.
The research report analyses results from a survey of 150 IT decision makers. Participants were from businesses of varying sizes and sectors, from SMEs up to Enterprises, including private and public sector organisations. The research was UK based, with all decision makers being accountable for UK markets, although some may have had remit for wider strategical IT decisions outside of the UK also.
Key findings include:
RTO expectations are unrealistic based on recovery solutions
77 percent of companies expect to recover their IT systems within two hours. This is a significant increase over the 35 percent of companies who had the same recovery time objective (RTO) three years ago, however doesn’t seem to accurately correspond with the disaster recovery methods being adopted.
Businesses are becoming more conscious of data loss
Nearly one out of every four companies has a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than one hour, meaning that they are replicating or backing up their data at least once every hour. Three years ago, more than one half of companies surveyed weren’t aware of their RPO; now data loss has since become much more important to businesses, with less than one third having no RPO targets.
Organizations are testing their DR solution more frequently
The frequency of testing of recovery systems has significantly improved over the past three years, with the majority of companies testing every six months now. Plan B’s research in 2014 concluded that only 36 percent of companies were testing at least every six months. In contrast, 61 percent companies are now testing at least every six months.
The quality of testing has improved.
Over one half of companies test the full recovery of all systems when they run disaster recovery tests. This has more than doubled over the past three years.
Read the full survey report (PDF).
