When it comes to disaster recovery, it’s nothing but failure

A new study from the Disaster Recovery Preparedness (DRP) Council has nothing but doom and gloom when it comes to the state of disaster recovery.

The study size was small, only 1,000 organizations from both large and small enterprise, but the data is sure to hit close to home – especially where virtualized environments are concerned. The harsh reality is that for most firms, disaster recovery plans are something to have and show, but practice is another matter entirely.

According to the DRP, an independent research organization that focuses on disaster recovery management, research, and benchmarking, 73 percent of the respondents are failing to take adequate steps to protect their assets.

As such, the lack of prep when it comes to disaster recovery has led to more than $5 million worth of critical application failures, data center outages, and data loss.

Drilling down, 63 percent of the respondents said their disaster recovery budgets are not enough, or worse, underfunded. In addition, of those with adequate funding, the disaster recovery plans that have been established remain untested.

Of those that do test their plans, it’s an annual test, and they’ll often fail their own tests.

In a blog post, DRP Council’s Steve Kahan said:

“Without established documentation of a DR plan, most organizations can’t help but struggle when an outage or disaster occurs.

“One of my past experiences with a data center fire that caused a major loss of business services dramatically demonstrated to me personally the difficulty of trying to recover critical applications without a fully documented plan. In the event of an outage, chaos ensues unless you’ve spelled out specific steps for who does what in a disaster scenario.”

A full copy of the report is available online.

http://blogs.csoonline.com/disaster-recovery/3037/when-it-comes-disaster-recovery-its-nothing-failure