Protecting IT Assets During Disasters and Outages

By Dennis McCafferty

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Foreboding Figure

Nearly 35% of IT professionals and executives surveyed said their organization has suffered at least one incident or outage that required disaster recovery.
Frequent Failure

Four out of 10 organizations that have suffered an outage or incident have dealt with multiple incidents in the past five years.
Big Gamble

Nearly 51% of the respondents said their company is only "somewhat prepared" to recover IT assets in the event of a disaster, and 4% said they're not at all prepared.
Saving Grace, Part I

Almost 63% of those at organizations that use disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) said they're "very prepared" to recover from an incident.
Saving Grace, Part II

54% of those at companies for which disaster recovery/business continuity is a compliance requirement consider themselves "very prepared" to recover from an incident.
Leading Culprits

47% cite hardware failure/server room issues as a top cause of incidents and outages, while 35% said floods, fires and other environmental events are likely to cause these problems.
Dreaded Downtime

Nearly 53% of respondents said it takes more than one business day to recover from their worst disaster recovery event.
Paltry Sum

Nearly 55% of the companies surveyed spend less than $50,000 annually on disaster recovery/business continuity, and 39% said they're underfunded.
Top Approaches to Protect Assets

Backup tapes: 45%, Additional servers at primary site: 42%, A secondary site that mirrors the primary one: 41%, Software replication: 34%, High-availability hardware and software: 33%
Making Changes

25% of respondents said they altered their disaster recovery plan as a result of an incident/outage, and 16% change their disaster recovery testing plan, procedures and/or frequency.
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Despite the frequency of disasters and network outages, many organizations remain under-prepared for these incidents, according to a recent survey from Evolve IP. As a result, these companies run the risk of losing IT assets that directly impact productivity and profitability, findings show. Many organizations have suffered multiple incidents within the past five years, and it frequently takes an entire day or longer to bounce back from major events. The most common causes of disasters and outages are hardware failures and server room issues, but natural disasters, such as floods, storms and fires, also play a major role. One possible remedy: disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), which many businesses are using as a means to safeguard against anything and everything. "For many organizations, the question isn't 'if' they will suffer a disaster, it's 'when,'" says Tim Allen, chief sales officer at Evolve IP. "When disaster hits, [it typically takes] over a day to recover, causing financial as well as data losses." Nearly 2,085 IT professionals and executives took part in the research.

This article was originally published on 2015-02-06

Dennis McCafferty is a freelance writer for Baseline Magazine.

Protecting IT Assets During Disasters and Outages

Foreboding Figure

Frequent Failure

Big Gamble

Saving Grace, Part I

Saving Grace, Part II

Leading Culprits

Dreaded Downtime

Paltry Sum

Top Approaches to Protect Assets

Making Changes