Around 56 percent of more than 1,000 U.K. enterprises had
integrated IT DR into their organization’s business continuity plan, while 82.6
percent had made this move in the U.S, according to a survey by Neverfail.
Respondents in both the U.S. (29.5 percent) and the U.K.
(31.3 percent) stated that they do not consider cloud platforms to be a viable
option for DR, although organizations in the U.S. were ahead of their U.K.
counterparts with regards to virtualizing business critical applications.
Seventy-two percent of U.S. organizations have made this
move in comparison to 58 percent of U.K. respondents.
The survey was conducted among nearly 2,500 IT managers
and C-level executives from public and private sector organizations in the U.K.
and U.S. The results highlight regional differences in approaches to disaster
recovery (DR) and IT infrastructure provisioning, according to Neverfail.
Of those companies that had not integrated IT DR into business continuity plans: 45.9 percent of U.K. respondents did not deem
it a business priority – only 22.4 percent of U.S. respondents shared this
view.
The perceived cost of such technology was the primary
deterrent in the U.S. (22.1 percent), with 18.3 percent of U.K. respondents
also viewing cost as an inhibitor.
This is particularly interesting considering that 23.4
percent of U.S. respondents had experienced an IT outage of longer than a full
business day, while 18.8 percent of U.K. respondents had experienced an outage
on this scale.
Observing differences in approaches to DR across two
geographies has provided great insight into general adoption levels around hot
industry trends such as virtualization and cloud computing,” said Bob
Roudebush, VP of marketing at Neverfail.
Noting that U.S. businesses are slightly ahead of their
U.K. counterparts with regards to the virtualization of tier-one applications
perhaps signifies more widespread adoption of virtualization generally in this
region, and it is also very interesting to see that the concerns around cloud
platforms are very similar to the apprehensions and stigma that surrounded
virtualization four to five years ago,” Roudebush added.
With 208 businesses in the U.S. and 101 U.K.
organizations stating that the hourly cost of downtime is greater than $10,000,
it is surprising that IT is not incorporated into DR planning as standard,
particularly when considering that 47 percent of U.S. respondents and 42.4
percent of those in the U.K. stated that in the event of downtime, they are
contacted immediately and incessantly by employees until the problem is
resolved.
Seventy-nine percent of those surveyed in the U.S. stated
that they operate a heterogeneous IT infrastructure (physical, cloud and
virtual), while 55.7 percent of U.K. respondents had diversified this way.
By TelecomLead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
