Disaster recovery still not priority for business

Disaster recovery is still being left to chance by many businesses despite the threat of outages that range from straightforward software or hardware failure to terrorist attacks, power supply problems and virus outbreaks, according to analyst group IDC.

Martin Hingley, VP of the European systems group at IDC, told silicon.com the high cost of disaster recovery and business continuity means it is usually not a priority for firms until they have been hit by a problem themselves.

"It is almost always going to come from some disaster. It is experience related," he said.

With the economic downturn forcing many companies to cut back on IT spending, the cost of implementing back-up facilities and other business continuity plans is also a prohibitive factor for the person in charge of the company purse strings. But Hingley said firms need to strike a balance between cost and risk, factoring in how much business runs through each system, how much would be lost if it went down and how many man hours it would take to fix it.

"The more computerised the application the greater the consequences of failure. People will go down but the key is how quickly can you get back up," he said.

Hingley also warned that businesses are increasing their exposure to risk because of IT consolidation and centralisation projects that have been driven by the need to cut costs. While this has resulted in efficiencies it also creates a single point of failure.

He said: "The strange advantage of messy distributed servers is that if one goes down you don't notice. There's a huge concentration on cost savings and that is the driver behind consolidation, but it is important to think about the business continuity consequences - make sure you can guarantee uptime with some clustering or mirroring."

Hingley was speaking to silicon.com at the launch of a proof-of-concept business continuity testing facility in Ireland run by Dell, EMC, Esat BT and Nortel. Businesses are able to use the facility to test back-up and recovery of their applications and storage networks at the dual-centre site that operates over 60 miles between Dell's application solution centre in Limerick and EMC's centre in Cork.

IDC researches into the drivers for business continuity purchases this year shows that the risk of software or hardware failure, the failure of internal data back-ups and power cuts are the main concerns of IT directors and not security breaches, theft or terrorism.