Survey: Partners Can Guide Firms to Cloud Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) as practiced by most firms is “broken,” giving channel partners an opportunity to introduce automated options to replace outdated operating models.
That’s according to a survey of 343 IT executives responsible for DR by CloudVelox. Some 58 percent of respondents said they test their DR just once per year or less, while an additional 33 percent of respondents said they test infrequently or never.
One in four respondents said they experience failure or delay more than half the time when they test their secondary data centers. A minor data center outage could become a serious headache, and a major disaster could prove catastrophic.
Greg Ness, CloudVelox’s vice president of worldwide marketing, tells Channel Partners that DR at most firms is not a best practice due to extensive manual processes and the lack of internal resources.
“The cloud is an option, per the survey,” he said. “Fifty-five percent of respondents are willing to leverage the cloud for DR if they can extend security and network controls into the cloud.”
The survey also shows that recovery point objectives (RPOs) are less than optimum for traditional DR. Only 21 percent of respondents said their RPO is less than two hours, while 46 percent said it is from two to 12 hours, and 33 percent said it is more than 12 hours.
Cloud DR offerings can reliably reduce RPO to less than one hour, depending on size and availability of bandwidth, and the frequency with which the app environment changes, Ness said.
The multibillion-dollar category of DR services is “antiquated and ripe for disruption by fast-growing IaaS providers,” Ness said.
The disaster-recovery-as-a-service market is expected to grow from $1.42 billion in 2015 to $11.92 billion by 2020, at a compound annual growth rate of 52.9 percent from 2015 to 2020, according to MarketsandMarkets analysis.
“More than anything, cloud DR is poised to take off and disrupt an outdated ecosystem of products and services,” he said. “You’re going to see more and more demand to automate the cumbersome manual processes that complicate traditional DR.”
The 343 survey respondents represented nine different industries, including oil and gas, basic materials, industrial, consumer goods, consumer services, health care, telecommunications, utilities and finance.
The oil and gas industry had the highest average RPO, with 70 percent of respondents saying their RPO took 12 or more hours, including 30 percent who said it took more than 24 hours. This industry also tests DR the least frequently, with 80 percent of respondents saying they test once a year or less. The health-care industry tests the second least frequently, with 69 percent testing once a year or less.
The consumer services and health-care industries were most willing to embrace cloud DR provided they could automate network and security controls to the cloud, with 65 percent of consumer services and 64 percent of health care respondents opting for cloud DR, given automation.
