According to a new survey by ILM Audit 2007, data archiving and disaster recovery are likely to lead the storage related IT concerns for 2008.  The Audit reveals that IT departments top five storage related concerns are:

1. Disaster Recovery
2. File Archiving
3. Email Archiving
4. Data Backup
5. Database Archiving

59% percent of IT departments credit Disaster Recovery as their top concern for data storage related considerations.  The report further announced that 84% of IT executives stated that storage vendors should be doing more to improve the energy efficiency of their products. The issue brings us the “green” storage topic which is expected to gain even larger ground in 2008 and beyond.

In addition to the top 5 storage concerns were: Continuous Data Protection, Encryption of Archived Data, Storage Management/ILM, Storage Resource Management, and Secondary Storage Consolidation.

According to the report, the proportion of companies holding over 1TB on primary storage has increased from 59% in 2006 to 73% in the 2007 ILM Audit. And at the top end, one in five (21%) of all companies are now holding over 10TB of data on primary storage. But the research also reveals that between 30 to 50 percent of data held on primary storage is inactive and unlikely to be accessed again.

When asked what factors are driving interest in data archiving, the top issue highlighted by the survey sample was disaster recovery followed by regulatory compliance and data growth.

Discover why companies in Texas and beyond trust Digital Reach with for Data Backup, Storage, and Recovery.

You never need insurance until you don’t have it.  Expect the unexpected right? A Disaster Recovery plan is insurance for the unexpected.  By expecting to encounter a disaster in which you need to restore critical data from another source, you are protecting your business from such a disaster.

However, determining your company’s specific needs for Disaster Recovery can be a complicated task. CIOs have to understand that the lack of a comprehensive Disaster Recovery plan can have a serious impact on ROI, a key indicator as to how successful CIOs are measured.

According to Jeffrey Miller, IT Director at Houston-based Cotton Cos., an organization can measure the ROI of disaster recovery plans, notably data recovery plans, by looking at the cost to the business should a disaster strike. “If we lost all our data, it would be equal to losing $1 million or so, not counting all the lost productivity and the manpower involved in trying to restore the data,” Miller said.

The most important factors a company needs to consider when crafting Disaster Recovery plans are how long it can afford to be down and how current it wants recovered data to be.

Companies are smart to outsource such a vital task as backup and Disaster Recovery to an outside vendor — a specialist with the right technology, the best practices, the experience and the facilities to manage it successfully.

Companies that have comprehensive disaster recovery plans in place — including secure, remote, automatic backup for recovery of business-critical information -– are the companies that will see the highest ROI if and when the worst hits.

Source: SearchCIO.com

To learn more about how Digital Reach, Inc. can develop your Disaster Recovery Plan, click here.

Disaster recovery used to be reserved for large enterprises, but in the increasingly 24/7 business world, more and more midmarket firms are finding they can’t afford not to keep things running. And high-availability requirements are growing all the time. Forrester Research estimates that enterprises have doubled the number of mission-critical database applications in the past five years. Yet many firms remained poorly prepared. A Gartner survey found that almost half of midmarket and large enterprises had relatively weak Diaster Recovery plans.

More and more companies don’t have a choice. Publicly traded companies face Sarbanes-Oxley mandates for data retention, while private companies in industries as different as the wine business and finance must meet government regulations for record-keeping and service continuity.

While Disaster Recovery planning may be more challenging for resource-strapped midmarket businesses than large enterprises, there still are basic ways to ensure a timely recovery and maximal continuity.

The first step is to conduct a detailed review of the vulnerabilities that IT and the overall business face by performing a business impact analysis (BIA). should cover what threats are likely (power outage, natural disaster, terrorism) and the possible consequences in terms of lost revenue, productivity and reputation.

The second step is to establish realistic and specific business recovery objectives. RTO and RPO requirements need to be defined in terms of risk/reward. That is, how much protection does the company really need, and how much is it willing to pay for?

IT should advise and execute, but overall responsibility for Disaster Recovery should be vested in line-of-business owners. CIOs should make a case for Disaster Recovery investment so that the business owners can go after the funding. Finding metrics to measure Disaster Recovery can be hard, but IT should at least measure the effective-ness of any solution during a test.

Once the plan is in place, one of the most crucial decisions is whether IT has the expertise and resources to implement the project or if outside help is needed. Forrester reports that most of the enterprises surveyed found that implementing a Disaster Recovery plan required more work than expected. Gartner’s Scott says a quarter to a third of large enterprises outsource Disaster Recovery, while three-quarters of midmarket firms do.

Portions of this post were derived from Roadmap to Recovery - searchcio.com

To learn more about Diaster Recovery and how you can best protect your business, contact Digital Reach, Inc. today.

CIOs understand the importance of disaster recovery while business executives do not.  Not only do business executives underestimate the importance of such disaster recovery planning, they also fail to understand how technology failures can affect their companies. 

In a new survey by Harris Interactive Inc., 71% of IT executives identified disaster recovery as very important or crucial to business success.  Only 49% of business executives felt that way.

IT leaders are more in tune with the importance of diaster recovery because the backup of data and systems has always been an IT responsibility. Business executives who fail to see the importance of disaster recovery and business continuity are failing to understand their customers’ needs.

Many business executives don’t know what’s under the hood in their company. They are unaware of how a technology failure can cause a train reaction that hurts the business.

Just 54% of business executives surveyed believed planning for uninterrupted information availability is necessary, versus 66% of IT executives. Only 63% of business executives thought the availability of networks, data, systems and applications is very important to business success, versus 86% of IT executives.

The survey also found that a lack of understanding of the actual cost and complexity of a business continuity plan by business leaders makes it difficult for IT executives to get the proper funding. The upshot: Business executives don’t think plans cost as much as they do.

Vice President of IT research at Computer Economics, Mark McManus had this to say:

“It’s an education process for upper management,” he said. “Present your case, bring in the experts, and talk about the potential risks they’re facing. It really comes down to making them understand that keeping technology available is crucial. If the technology is not there, the business cannot run. If they don’t do this, and they don’t get complete buy-in from business units, then they might not be able to recover after a disaster. It doesn’t happen that often, but if you look at [Hurricane] Katrina, there are a lot of companies that never came back from that.”

Are you protected should your company be exposed to a disaster?  Find out now!