Restoring Critical Applications Tops Protection Concerns

Enterprises know that employees and customers both expect critical systems to run around the clock without failure. That’s putting pressure on IT to examine their backup and recovery strategies and procedures.

A survey conducted last quarter and sponsored by Quest Software asked over 200 North American IT professionals about their concerns; almost three in four organizations (73 percent) put restoring critical applications along with recovering lost or corrupted data at the top of their list of backup and recovery concerns. Even so, a mere 5 percent are creating recovery objectives based on applications, and 78 percent still create their objectives ”based at data, servers, or a combination of both.”

Another 22 percent put “simply ensuring the recoverability of lost or corrupt data” at the top of the list.

“Problematically," Quest points out, “traditional data protection solutions require organizations to build recovery objectives based on servers and infrastructure, with no visibility into the recoverability of the underlying applications that drive business activity. As a result, only 5 percent of organizations surveyed indicated that they build their recovery objectives strictly around applications; 78 percent said applications 'play no role whatsoever' in forming the recovery objectives for their enterprise."

Rapid recovery and, from what ESJ readers tell me, self-service recovery, are gaining IT’s attention. That’s especially true the more data you have. In fact, 70 percent of respondents said that at least “half of the data their organizations produce is considered mission-critical” (23 percent of all respondents said the figure was at least 75 percent), and “nearly one-third of respondents (32 percent) [indicated] that company management has specifically asked them to seek ways to reduce recovery times within the past year.”

For some (15 percent) enterprises, there’s a disconnect between “their formal service level agreements (SLAs) and the actual service level expectations (SLEs) of their employees and customers.” That’s amplified by the one-quarter of respondents who said they only “revisit their SLAs once every few years.” (emphasis added)

 -- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ

Posted on 07/10/2012