Overconfidence in Disaster Recovery: Common and Costly
As reported in CloudTech, a recent study in the UK of 250 businesses finds that 95% experienced outages or data loss in the past year, with 87% needing to go to failover systems.
There is a mismatch between expectation and reality when it comes to disaster recovery.
Of the 87% that executed a failover, 82% were confident it would go well, but 55% encountered problems. And while 69% stated outages lasting minutes would be “highly disruptive” or “catastrophic”, only 27% were able to recover all systems immediately following an outage. With 37% of respondents indicating they do not regularly test their DR capabilities, many organizations have no basis for expecting a smooth failover.
Outage Sources
While we often focus on the “big disaster” that could interrupt our businesses, 53% of the outages were to mundane system failures and 52% were due to human error (more than one response was possible). Cyber attacks and environmental issues caused 32% and 20% of the outages, respectively.
Three Things We Can Learn
- Comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity costs money. Running infrastructure and systems in the cloud and/or using cloud-based DR and Business Continuity solutions can help mitigate these costs. You will, however, need to assess potential downtime and time to recover, the impact of downtime, and the cost to create the right balance for your organization.
- Testing your DR/Business Continuity solutions should be easy and cost-effective. Plan on testing at least twice per year.
- Your DR/Business continuity solution should help reinforce your overall data protection and business operations. Shifting from a “recovery”-centric strategy to one of resilience can lower costs and minimize the risks and impacts of unplanned outages.
If you want to improve your business’ resilience and lower your IT costs, contact us for a free Cloud Advisor session.
