Virtualisation, Cloud Add Complexity To DR Initiatives

Symantec Corp. has announced the India findings of its sixth annual Symantec Disaster Recovery Study. The study demonstrates the growing challenge of managing disparate virtual, physical and cloud resources because of added complexity for organisations protecting and recovering mission critical applications and data. In addition, the study shows that virtual systems are not properly protected.

As Indian enterprises increasingly adopt virtualisation, it is having a big impact on their disaster recovery plans. The study highlights that in India nearly 50 percent of data on virtual systems is not regularly backed up and only 10 percent of the data and mission-critical applications in virtual environments is protected by replication. The data also highlights that 70 percent of those surveyed were concerned about data loss as an impact of a disaster.

The study indicated that virtualisation led 71 percent to re-evaluate DR plans in 2010; this is up from the 61 percent reported by respondents in 2009.

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“While Indian enterprises are adopting new technologies such as virtualisation and the cloud to reduce costs, they are currently adding more complexity to their environments and leaving mission critical applications and data unprotected,” said Anand Naik, Director, Systems Engineering, Symantec. “We expect to see enterprises adopt tools that provide a holistic solution with a consistent set of policies across all environments. Datacentre managers should simplify and standardise so they can focus on fundamental best practices that help reduce downtime.”

Inadequate Tools, Security and Control

Using multiple tools that manage and protect applications and data in virtual environments causes major difficulties for datacentre managers. In particular, nearly seven in 10 respondents in India (68 percent) who encountered problems protecting mission-critical applications in virtual and physical environments reported this to be a large challenge for their organisation.

In terms of cloud computing, respondents reported that their organisation runs 29 percent of mission-critical applications in the cloud. While 41 per cent of Indian enterprises report that security is the main concern of putting applications in the cloud, 27 percent responded that ability to backup is the biggest challenge.

Resource and Storage Constraints Hamper Backup

Respondents state that 83 percent of backups occur only weekly or less frequently, rather than daily.

Resource constraints, lack of storage capacity, and incomplete adoption of advanced and more efficient protection methods hampers rapid deployment of virtual environments. Nearly a third of the respondents felt that resource constraints (people, budget and space) are the top challenge in backing up virtual machines.

Lack of capacity was a particular concern– with 38 per cent of respondents indicating lack of backup storage and 33 per cent indicating lack of primary storage capacity
20 percent of respondents use advanced methods (clientless) to reduce the impact of virtual machine backups.

The Downtime and Recovery Gap

The study showed that the time required to recover from an outage is twice as long as respondents perceive it to be. When asked if a significant disaster were to occur at their organisation that destroyed the main datacentre, respondents indicated that they expected the downtime per outage to be less than one hour to be up and running after an outage.

However, the actual downtime in the last 12 months was over five hours per outage. Organisations experienced a median of three downtime incidents in the past 12 months.

Major Causes of Downtime

When asked what caused their organisation to experience downtime over the past five years, respondents reported their outages were mainly from system upgrades, power outages and failures and cyber-attacks. When compared to the global data, Indian enterprises took the longest to recover from cyber attacks and a higher number experienced outages due to system upgrades. Specifically:

82 percent experienced an outage from system upgrades, resulting in 18.5 hours of downtime.
68 percent experienced an outage from power outages and failures, resulting in 11.2 hours of downtime.
60 percent experienced an outage from cyber attacks over the past 12 months resulting in 73.4 hours of downtime, compared to the global average of 52.7 hours.

The study also showed a gap between those organisations that experience power outages and failures and those who have conducted an impact assessment for power outages and failures. Surprisingly, only 42 percent of respondents’ organisations have conducted a power outage and failure impact assessment.

Symantec Recommendations:

• Ensure that mission-critical data and applications are treated the same across environments (virtual, cloud, physical) in terms of DR assessments and planning

• Use integrated tool sets for managing physical, virtual and cloud environments to save time, training costs and help better automate processes

• Embrace low-impact backup methods and deduplication to ensure that mission-critical data in virtual environments is backed up, efficiently replicated off campus

• Prioritise planning activities and tools that automate and perform processes which minimise downtime during system upgrades

• Implement solutions that detect issues, reduce downtime and recover faster to be more in line with expectations