Disaster recovery confidence up

Disasters may have been front page news around the world in 2011, but there's still plenty of room for improvement for many businesses when it comes to disaster recovery and protection plans according to the Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index 2012. The Index is based on responses from almost 6000 IT practitioners worldwide, though not in New Zealand. Karl Sice, Acronis general manager, Pacific, says while the findings are not New Zealand specific, 'New Zealand isn't so different from Australia, in terms of having many SMBs, and there are great opportunities for resellers to use the global findings in discussions with their customers'. The index shows our Tasman neighbours have doubled in confidence in the past year when it comes to disaster recovery capabilities – but despite the increased confidence Australia's index position remains the lowest among English speaking countries surveyed. Compared to the previous survey, Australian organisations were 36% more confident their backup and disaster recovery operations won't fail; 22% more confident they had boardroom support; 32% more confident they had enough resources and 39% more confident they had the necessary technologies. But despite the confidence boost, 64% of Australian businesses surveyed are concerned that backup and DR operations may fail in the wake of a serious incident or event, compared to a global average of 50%. And 41% think they could possibly suffer substantial downtime in the event of serious incidents. Lack of budget was cited as the number one reason for backup and DR plans not being given more priority, followed by lack of IT resources, at 31% and 25% respectively. The majority of Australian organisations surveyed (82%) had experienced one or more instances of system downtime during the past 12 months that had on average, lasted 1.9 days – shorter than the global average of 2.2 days. The cost of the lost productivity amounted to US$408,077 – above the global average of US$366,363. Worldwide, every region cited moving data between physical, virtual and cloud environments as their greatest challenge with regards to backing up in a hybrid environment. Complexity was cited as the second biggest challenge – no surprise with 42% of Australians using three or more back up and DR applications. Sice says while there has been some improvement on last year's results 'there is still a massive opportunity' in selling disaster recovery/protection in New Zealand. "One of our challenges is that it's not just about how to sell our product against competitors, but how to educate the market," Sice says. "Education is definitely the answer. It's really important that business customers understand and mitigate risks and they can only do that if they have the knowledge."