Data Recovery Digest

A survey conducted by Quorum titled the State of Disaster Recovery has found that while companies spend a lot of money on disaster recovery solutions, some of them employing multiple products at once, this doesn’t always translate into faster data recovery.

250 CIOs, CTO and IT vice presidents were surveyed, finding that 80% of those companies said it takes them more than an hour to recover from server failure. 26% said that it took more than two hours to recover data. Overall, only 19% said that it took them less than an hour to recover, which is far too few when you consider that 72% also said that they consider the speed of backup and data recovery as critical.

Indeed, they’re right – speed is critical because you need to minimise your downtime as much as possible. For every minute your data is down you are losing productivity and there’s financial repercussions. You need to ensure that your data is back up and running as soon as possible.

However, the report found that many firms are running multiple backup and disaster recovery (BDR) products with the intention of making their recovery faster, but that it’s not actually having any improvement on the speed.

Of those surveyed, 64% use more than three different disaster recovery solutions. 26% use more than five and just less than 40% use between one and three products. Interestingly, nine out of ten firms said that they wanted to conciliate their solutions into a single dashboard in order to simplify the management of all the products that they’re using.

With the report showing that having more BDR products in place having no impact on recovery speed, it seems that many firms could probably cut down and aim for a single solution that offers all the necessary features along with the recovery speed.

Along with this information, the report also showed that there’s been a strong uptake with cloud solutions. 75% of those surveyed are using cloud-based disaster recovery solutions, with 36% using a hybrid model that combines on-premises and cloud solutions. 39% use Disaster Recovery as a Service.

The vast majority of those surveyed said that they plan to use more cloud-based disaster recovery solutions, suggesting that the booming cloud market will show no signs of slowing down as we enter into 2017.

The need for disaster recovery products also continues to rise as enterprises are rightly concerned about security and the protection of their data. And it seems that the investments are paying off because 77% of respondents said they have used disaster recovery solutions after a security threat occurred; 53% of total respondents are more concerned about security than hardware failure, natural disaster or backup disk corruption.

“Natural disasters crashing in on a data center, an employee error or a hardware failure can all pose immense problems for an organization. But a skilled and wilful attack can cripple a brand for years and could cost a literal fortune. Ransomware attacks particularly depend on a team’s inability to recover quickly,” said the report.