A new report named ‘Disaster Unpreparedness’ has been published by MeriTalk which is an online community and go-to resource for government IT. The report which was underwritten by NetApp and SwishData details how confident IT professionals working for federal agencies are with their current data backup and disaster recovery solutions.
In December 2012, MeriTalk surveyed 150 Federal Department of Defence and civilian IT professionals to see how confident they are with their current disaster recovery strategy, how resilient they deem their strategy to be and how often they test their strategy.
The federal IT professionals who participated in the survey scored themselves very highly for their data backup and disaster recovery preparedness with 70% giving their agency a grade of ‘A’ or ‘B’. Despite the IT professionals awarding their agency such high marks for their data backup and disaster recovery preparedness, only 8% believed that they would be able to recover all the data in the event of a natural or man-made incident.
It is widely expected that the IT professionals who are working for the federal agencies and their current data backup and disaster recovery solutions will come under greater pressure in the next couple of years as the amount of data that they are dealing with is expected to increase. Agencies expect that the amount of data needed to be backed up will grow by 39% and therefore causing a huge amount of problems. 25% of the Federal IT professionals believe that their current data backup and disaster recovery solution will only be suitable for the next 12 months and no longer whilst 46% believe that their current solution will be sufficient for the next 12 months.
The federal IT professionals are also experiencing problems with testing their disaster recovery plan as often as they would wish. It was reported that on average, their disaster recovery plan was tested 2.5 times in the last 12 months. However, when asked how many times they would recommend running their disaster recovery plan in 12 months, an average of 5.3 was suggested. It was also revealed that the main reason for the federal IT professionals not being able to run their disaster recovery plan as often as they would like was due to lack of funding which contributed for 68%, a lack of support from the agency owners and having an incomplete solution in place both contributed for 42% each.
The importance of having a fully working and tested backup and disaster recovery solution in place is vital for the running of a company in the event of a man-made or natural disaster. Ideally, you will utilise a robust cloud based solution where your data is stored in two geographically separated data centres. Having the knowledge that you can recover your data, no matter what happens at your office and/or the primary data centre where a copy of your backed up data is being kept is becoming ever more important. By not being able to recover 1% of your data could have a detrimental impact on the reputation of your business and financially.
Why utilise a solution when you believe that it will not be able to cope with your expected data growth and cannot recover all of your data in the event of a disaster?
Can your backup solution cope with data growth? Are you confident that you can recover all your data in the event of a disaster?
