The Cloud And Your BC/DR Plan


Written by Phil on December 28, 2011 in Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, survey.

Just 23% of the 414 respondents to InformationWeek’s latest BC/DR survey use cloud services as part of their application and data resiliency strategies. What’s the holdup?

Business continuity and disaster recovery need to be a core competency, on par with security. But InformationWeek’s trending research shows IT organizations are stuck in a rut, failing to take advantage of new services and technologies that could let them do BC/DR better.

How hopelessly are we spinning our wheels? Going back to InformationWeek’s January 2008 Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Survey, 74% of 560 respondents had BC/DR plans in place. For 42%, those strategies entailed the expensive and error-prone tactic of maintaining physical backup servers at secondary locations, and 27% dedicated 11% or more of their IT budgets to the cause.

Good thing server virtualization and public cloud services have made BC/DR easier and more affordable, right?

Not so fast. InInformationWeek ‘s 2011 BC/DR Survey, 27% of 371 respondents with BC/DR or planning to implement it still said they spend double-digit chunks of their IT budgets on BC/DR, with only a modest boost in expected recovery time and recovery point metrics. And of the 492 business IT pros with BC/DR plans we surveyed for our 2010 BC/DR poll, 28% exceeded 10% of their budgets.

That’s three polls, four years, and precious little forward motion.

See The Cloud And Your BC/DR Plan by Kurt Marko for InformationWeek (registration required).

 

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