IT threats force the overwhelming majority of UK businesses to trigger DR plans annually, but issues with testing, reliability, compliance and security thwart business continuity efforts
News highlights:
• Eighty-seven percent triggered a failover in the last year due to a system failure, human error, corrupted data, cyber-attack, environmental threat or unexplained downtime
• Majority suffered issues with DR failovers, despite initial confidence in their solution
• Sixty-nine percent reported mere minutes of downtime can have a highly disruptive or catastrophic impact to business
• Sixty-two percent reported compliance and security concerns are the biggest barrier to cloud-based DR
LONDON – 22nd September 2016 – As IT races to protect business against increasing threats, the large majority of companies have adopted disaster recovery (DR) technology to ensure
resilience in the event of a potential outage. iland, an award-winning cloud hosting provider, today published a report, The State of IT Disaster Recovery Amongst UK Businesses, that reveals real-world failover rates as well as overconfidence and other underlying issues that prevent companies from optimally ensuring business continuity.
The study, executed in June 2016 by independent market research company Opinion Matters, surveyed 250 UK decision makers on their IT DR plans to understand how organisations are approaching and leveraging DR.
The findings definitively reinforce the need for solid DR, as 87 percent of respondents were forced to trigger a failover in the past 12 months. While over half (58 percent) are using on-premise solutions for DR, well over one-third (38 percent) use a cloud-based solution, with both larger and smaller businesses adopting DRaaS at similar rates.
“In today’s business world, the question is no longer if a company will need to trigger a disaster recovery plan, but when,” said Justin Giardina, CTO at iland. “Recognising that dynamic, IT has shifted its DR focus to prioritise the reliability, security and compliance of a solution. This study shows there is work to be done, as teams seem to put too much confidence into inadequately tested systems and many don’t fully grasp the potential of available solutions—particularly when it comes to cloud.”
Highlights and key takeaways from the study include:
• Outages happen more frequently than many believe: A staggering 95 percent of respondents faced an IT issue that resulted in an outage or data loss over the past 12 months. Problems ranged from a system failure (53 percent) through to human error (52 percent), corrupted data (37 percent), cyber-attack (32 percent) and unexplained downtime (30 percent). Notably, only 20 percent of the respondents indicated IT issues stemmed from an environmental threat such as flood, storms, fire and power outages.
• Problems arise despite confidence in failover plans: Eighty-seven percent triggered a failover in the past 12 months, reinforcing the need for IT resilience. However, while 82 percent of respondents that executed a failover were confident it would be successful, more than half faced issues during the process. This is concerning since 69 percent reported mere minutes of downtime can have a highly disruptive or catastrophic impact to business.
• Testing and training are key, but currently insufficient: Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents claimed to have a trained team and test DR plans either quarterly or twice a year. However, given the prevalence of failover issues reported, this training and testing appears to be lacking. The remaining 37 percent either have a lightly trained or untrained team while DR testing is infrequent or nonexistent. This significant number highlights the need for more awareness on the importance of DR testing, and calls for DRaaS vendors to enable easy, non-intrusive testing that can be performed regularly and on demand. Vendor support throughout these efforts is also important.
• There is a gap in understanding of DRaaS reliability, security and compliance: A higher percentage of on-premise respondents are optimising for zero downtime (74 percent) while DRaaS adopters claim to accept minimal downtime in the name of budget (43 percent). This indicates that many IT leaders are not aware of the availability levels and recovery times of cloud-based DR, as it is possible to get the on-premise levels of uptime with DRaaS without the big budget spend. Similarly, when asked what prevented them from moving to DRaaS, nearly two-thirds of on-premise users cited concerns about maintaining security and compliance. While emphasis on security and compliance is critical, advanced DRaaS offerings deliver the same or superior levels of security as on-premise environments.
“When evaluating DR solutions, companies must look closely at security, compliance, manageability, support and testing capabilities, particularly because options vary greatly—
whether on-premise or in the cloud,” said Giardina. “For more than a decade, iland has helped companies around the globe to flexibly balance budget requirements, risk tolerance, geographic needs and other variables, enabling teams to achieve near-zero recovery rates despite their IT footprint.”
Gartner Inc. recently named iland a Leader in the 2016 “Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service”* for its ability to execute and completeness of vision. According to the report, “Gartner estimates the DRaaS market will nearly triple in the next three years to a revenue point of $3.4 billion by 2019.”
For more information on the study or iland’s disaster recovery services, go to:
• Study: The State of IT Disaster Recovery Amongst UK Businesses
• Infographic: Are you ahead or behind on disaster recovery?
• iland Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service
• Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service
Gartner Disclaimer
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organisation and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Source: Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service” by John Morency, Christine Tenneson, Ron Blair, June 16, 2016.
About iland
With data centres in the U.S., U.K. and Singapore, iland delivers the only enterprise cloud solutions in the market today with true innovation, transparency, intelligent management and advanced security built in. From scaling production workloads, to supporting testing and development, to disaster recovery, iland’s secure cloud and decades of experience translate into unmatched service. iland has been recognised as Veeam’s Service Provider of the Year and Zerto’s Cloud Service Provider Partner of the Year, as well as VMware’s Service Provider Partner of the Year, Global and Americas. iland is also part of the Cisco Cloud Managed Service Provider Program for IaaS and DRaaS and partners with other industry leaders including Trend Micro, Hytrust and Nimble Storage. Visit iland.com.
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