Progression Blog

Disasters are inevitable and their outcomes can be devastating. But that should not stop us from preparing for the worst-case scenarios. Often in case of unpredictable natural disasters like earthquakes, storms or cyclones, companies are often left stranded with no plan in place. The situation is not very different in manmade and technological disasters like human error, labor unrest, software or hardware failures and network and power outages. Not preparing in advance for these scenarios is in itself a disaster than actually being in one. Because the opportunity cost of not gearing up for a disaster is so massive that if companies calculate it, they’ll never give disaster recovery planning a skip.

TechTarget in its latest survey discovered that a little less than a third of respondents still don’t know the consequences of a disaster, as they admitted to not having a business disaster recovery, or DR plan. A good point that came out from the companies without a DR plan was that they were aware of their shortcomings and were planning to invest going forward in disaster recovery planning. Progression had also invited a few CIOs and IT heads to a discussion on Disaster Recovery recently. In the discussion, one of key reasons we found out of not implementing a DR plan was “Management buy-in”. Findings from the Techtarget survey also pointed to the same reason, with 26% respondents stating they lacked the funds to put together a plan and 29% said they haven’t figured out a way to implement DR. No Confidence in the DR Plan A telling fact that has been brought up by from the survey was that among the companies that have made an investment in a disaster recovery planning for their business, only 41% rated their confidence level as “high” that their plans would work in an emergency situation. Others have little or no confidence in their plan. We certainly cannot blame these companies here, because the onus to instill the confidence and carry our DR drills lies on the service provider. Using Outdated Technologies The most-used tech tool for DR was disk-based backup, followed closely by remote replication which ships those backups to a remote recovery site. While those two tools top the popularity list, a technology that is largely now used for archival takes the next two places: tape. Forty three per cent said their plans include the use of off-site tape storage, while 41% just cited “tape backup” as a component of their recovery plans. Surprisingly, the technology which is the biggest buzz in the disaster recovery world these days, Cloud-based DR, was represented by only 28% respondents. Clearly, companies who are not using a DR plan need awareness, and companies who are using DR plan but with little confidence or not using most up to date technologies, need education. Talk to experts from Progression’s DRaaS team or better visit our Data Center for all your queries regarding disaster recovery solutions. Let us show you to get a good DR plan in place.