Symantec research reveals fewer executives involved in planning; IT managers remain pessimistic on recovery times, concerned with testing impact to bottom line

Symantec Corp.today announced the global results of its fourth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey, which demonstrates a significant decline in executive involvement in disaster recovery planning and a significant increase in the number of organisations reevaluating their disaster recovery (DR) plans due to virtualization. As more applications and data are managed in a virtual environment, organisations are evaluating the most efficient ways to manage applications and data in both physical and virtual environments.

Nearly one-third of global organisations, and 20 percent of Australian organisations, reported they have had to implement part of their DR plan due to a computer system failure. However, in the past year there was a significant decrease in executive involvement on DR committees. And, while there appears to be improvement in successful disaster recovery testing, one-third of global respondents (12 percent in Australia) indicate testing will impact their customers, and one-fifth globally (12 percent in Australia) admit such testing could negatively affect their organisation’s sales and revenue.

With a rapid increase in mission critical applications combined with the continued growth of stored data - both physical and virtual - it is crucial that organisations incorporate a comprehensive, proven disaster recovery plan into the overall business strategy. This will help ensure the successful recovery of data and applications with the least amount of impact to business operations should a disaster - natural disaster, human error or system failure - occur.

Sharp increase in applications considered mission-critical

On average global respondents indicated that 56 percent of applications were deemed mission critical - significantly up from 36 percent in 2007. Within Australia, approximately 64 percent of applications were deemed mission critical. With the increase in the number of mission critical applications, it becomes difficult for organisations with flat IT budgets to maintain the availability of a greater number of mission critical applications. As a result, companies should look at more cost effective ways to protect applications including reducing spare servers, increasing server capacity, looking at physical to virtual configurations, and more.

More than one-third of organisations have executed DR plans

Disaster recovery plans are not documents collecting dust on shelves. In the past year, one-third of organisations surveyed had to execute their disaster recovery plans due to a variety of factors including: Hardware and software failure (36 percent of organisations globally, 20 percent within Australia); external security threats (28 percent of organisations globally, 12 percent within Australia); power outage/failure/issues (26 percent of organisations globally, 10 percent within Australia); natural disasters (23 percent of organisations globally, 12 percent within Australia); IT problem management (23 percent of organisations globally, 10 percent within Australia); data leakage or loss (22 percent of organisations globally, 8 percent within Australia); and accidental or malicious employee behaviour (21 percent of organisations globally, 10 percent within Australia). Given the regularity of events that cause downtime, IT organisations should expect that their DR plans will be tested at some point in the future.

Executive involvement in DR planning declining

Survey results also indicate that that C-level involvement in DR planning is declining. In the 2007 survey, 55 percent of respondents said that their DR committees involved the CIO, CTO or IT director. However, in 2008 that number dropped to 33 percent worldwide. Symantec believes that such a move is a troubling trend, particularly in light of the mission critical applications not currently covered in DR plans and the reevaluation of plans due to virtualization. Increased executive involvement has been shown to increase the success of DR plans.