Research: BC/DR and the Cloud
Research: Cloud’s Role in BC/DR
Cloud services can play a role in any business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Yet if our readership is any indication, these services are largely untapped—just 23% of the 414 business technology professionals responding to our InformationWeek 2011 Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Survey use cloud services as part of their application and data resiliency strategies, even though half correctly say it would reduce overall recovery times.
In this report, we’ll examine the state of business continuity planning in the enterprise while looking at trends over the past year; outline the types of data and applications most often protected; go over typical disaster recovery design parameters, like data set sizes and recovery windows; and summarize the features respondents expect out of a cloud backup and DR service before signing on the dotted line.
Fact is, the combination of cloud backup and virtual machine IaaS offerings can be a beneficial part of a “DR 2.0” plan. Yet cloud services still face resistance in many corners of IT, including a sizable share of our survey respondents. Their reservations are most commonly driven by concerns over data security, service reliability, vendor performance and data lock-in; however, new cloud security and audit standards, distributed cloud data centers, and tighter SLAs mean these needn’t be roadblocks to adoption. We’ll wrap up by outlining three cloud DR architectures, each progressively more sophisticated and resilient, and sum up how best to introduce the cloud into your overall DR design. (R3271111)
Survey Name InformationWeek Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Survey
Survey Date July 2011
Region North America
Number of Respondents 414
Purpose To determine business continuity/disaster recovery plans in the enterprise, with a focus on incorporating cloud services.
Table of Contents
3 Author’s Bio
4 Executive Summary
5 Research Synopsis
6 Do You Have a Plan?
7 Impact Assessment: Cloud-based BC/DR
8 What’s Worth Protecting?
10 Hired Help
11 What, Us Worry?
13 Safety First
15 What About Backups?
19 Part of a Plan
23 Technical Issues
24 Virtualization’s Role
26 Appendix
39 Related Reports
About the Author
Kurt Marko is an InformationWeek and Network Computing contributor and IT industry veteran, pursuing his passion for communications after a varied career that has spanned virtually the entire high-tech food chain from chips to systems. Upon graduating from Stanford University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering, Kurt spent several years as a semiconductor device physicist, doing process design, modeling and testing. He then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a memory chip designer and CAD and simulation developer.
Moving to Hewlett-Packard, Kurt started in the laser printer R&D lab doing electrophotography development, for which he earned a patent, but his love of computers eventually led him to join HP’s nascent technical IT group. He spent 15 years as an IT engineer and was a lead architect for several enterprisewide infrastructure projects at HP, including the Windows domain infrastructure, remote access service, Exchange e-mail infrastructure and managed Web services.
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 Great ReportComment by GTELLONE000 Feb-16,2012 2:25:05 PMThanks for this great report! A lot of interesting data and analysis here we can use over at Continuity Centers. Reply |
