Cloud Inspires Confidence in Disaster Recovery

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The cloud is a confidence-booster, in terms of disaster recovery at least.

Zetta’s recent survey of 403 IT professionals revealed that 90 percent of those who have incorporated the cloud into their disaster recovery setups are confident in their disaster recovery strategy. That figure dips to 74 percent among those who take an on-premises approach.

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Fortunately, most organizations (96 percent) have some sort of disaster recovery solution to fall back on. Half are using the cloud in some capacity and 9 percent have taken the plunge, relying solely on the cloud for disaster recovery.

The data protection specialist’s findings suggest there’s a good chance many of those businesses will be put to the test.

Fifty-four percent of respondents said that sometime in the past five years. they suffered a data outage lasting at least eight hours. Power outages are the main culprit is (75 percent), followed by human error (53 percent).

Malware attacks (34 percent) are also taking their toll and data corruption (26 percent) continues to plague some IT shops. Updates and patches, of both the expected (20 percent) and unexpected (24 percent) kind, have caused some downtime. Ironically, natural (20 percent) and onsite disasters (11 percent) are generally less common.

“While many think of disaster recovery as preparing for catastrophic natural events, most IT downtime can be caused by simple power outages, hardware and human errors and, increasingly, security vulnerabilities. However, that certainly doesn’t mean that the DR event is any less critical or costly,” said Mike Grossman, CEO of Zetta, in prepared remarks.

Even with protections in place, many organizations may still get caught off guard.

A significant minority of organizations (40 percent) lack a documented disaster recovery plan. Another 40 percent of only conduct a test of their disaster recovery plans once a year.

“This study reveals, that even as organizations improve their disaster readiness, they still fall behind in planning and testing their strategy,” added Grossman. “Yet, this is rapidly shifting as DR confidence grows with the increasing move towards cloud-based [disaster recovery] solutions.”

Like the cloud, having a document plan boosts IT professionals’ confidence in their disaster recovery strategy. Organizations with more than 500 employees were more likely to have a documented plan (74 percent) than smaller companies (54 percent).

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.