Frequent DR Testing Critical to Meeting Recovery Objectives – iland Study

iland Internet Solutions Corporation released the findings of its research into organizations’ DR readiness.

The study found that as organizations work diligently to support evolving business needs, while at the same time battling cybercrime and other threats to critical data, the majority of DR solutions are not tested on a regular basis. More importantly, as the IT estate changes over time, the survey indicated most DR solutions would not meet recovery objectives.

The research, When Plan B Goes Wrong: Avoiding the Pitfalls of DRaaS surveyed 150 technical and business decision makers from organizations drawn from a wide cross-section of US enterprises, each employing a minimum of 500 people. The objectives of the research were to establish what DR systems organizations currently have in place, how often plans are tested and whether enterprises are confident in their ability to recover from disaster as swiftly and easily as possible.

Key findings include:

• Just over half (54%) of respondents had a documented, company-wide DR plan in place.
• Failures and outages are more common than people realize. 73% reported experiencing failure at some point. Almost two-thirds of that group had experienced the outage within the last 12 months and almost half of those within six months.
• 57% have a second on-premise data center for DR purposes.
• DR testing frequency is very low. Just 50% are testing only annually or at less frequent intervals, while 7% did not test their DR at all.
• Of the organizations testing less frequently, half said their DR plan may be inadequate based on their most recent DR test, while 12% encountered issues that would result in sustained downtime.
• Zero respondents said that their DR test was completely or moderately successful. Everyone reported experiencing issues.
• Of the issues experienced, most reported networking issues (67%), service unavailability (67%), data integrity problems (50%), application performance issues (50%) or missing critical workloads (50%).
• Those testing more regularly are far more likely to have ambitious objectives for data recovery than those who test less frequently. 32% expected to recover data in seconds or minutes and 23% actually did so. 
• Hardware failure represented the most frequently reported cause of a recent data recovery need, with 38% citing it.
• The most frequently encountered problem with failback to original sites was networking problems, experienced by 62%.

“With the rise in remote work and the frequency and impact of cybercrime growing each year, having a comprehensive DR strategy in place is critical to ensure organizations can defend, protect and quickly recover from data loss,” said Scott Sparvero, CEO. “As we found in our research, DR implementations are on the rise, but regular testing is falling behind. This means that as IT teams deploy new resources to support increasing workload requirements, the DR plan needs to be updated in kind. Regular testing can quickly uncover any potential DR shortfalls. Working with a DRaaS provider like iland gives enterprises confidence in their DR solution. Through planned testing intervals, iland ensures that organizations are ready to recover as swiftly and quickly as possible.“

“While many organizations have been slow to embrace the cloud and DRaaS, the study indicates that the pandemic is likely to be accelerating the transition given the increased focus on remote work and access,” said Justin Augat, VP of product marketing. “Enterprises that have not yet done so must give very serious thought to the status of DR in their organization, and find the right platform to meet expectations of BC. iland is proven to protect a customer’s critical applications, and provides tangible benefits such as real-time replication to an increasing number of businesses.“