Disaster Recovery Budgets Are Flat

CU360
February 3, 2010 | COMMENTS

Disaster recovery budgets will remain flat for the next few years despite rising disaster recovery pressures on organizations due to soaring downtime costs and more stringent information technology (IT) service-level requirements.

This will require IT professionals to do more with less, according to Symantec Corp.'s fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery Survey.

The median cost for financial institutions to execute and implement disaster recovery plans for each downtime incident is $650,000, the survey reports. “This is alarming when you considers that one in four tests failed, and 93% of organizations have had to execute their disaster recovery plans,” according to the survey.

Respondents reported it takes, on average, three hours to achieve skeleton operations after an outage, and four hours to be up and running. This is much improved over 2008 findings, where only 3% of respondents reported they could achieve skeleton operations within 12 hours, and 31% said they could have baseline operations within one day.

Other key findings:

• More than half (52%) of respondents believe disaster recovery budgets will be flat in 2010, making it difficult for IT managers to leverage their hardware, software, and personnel.
• Executive involvement in disaster recovery planning doubled during the past year: 67% of organizations said their disaster recovery committees involved the chief information officer, chief technology officer, or IT director—up from 33% the previous year. That's because the impact of downtime on customers is greater than ever, and disaster recovery applications are viewed as mission-critical.
• Disaster recovery testing has improved, but it's still a major challenge: 35% of respondents test their plans once a year or less—a 12% improvement from the previous year. Reasons cited for not testing disaster recovery plans include lack of resources (48%), disruption to employees (44%), budget (44%), and disruption to customers (40%).
• Virtualization remains a major challenge: Nearly one-third of organizations don't test virtual environments as part of their disaster recovery initiatives. Also, 36% of data on virtualized systems isn't backed up regularly.