Current Status of IT Disaster Recovery in the Asia Pacific

A recent survey of more than 2000 IT decision makers in Japan and the Asia Pacific during the first quarter of 2012 provided an overview of how enterprises are dealing with disaster recovery and the reduction of tape backup technology in exchange for cloud hosted solutions.  The study provided a snapshot of the common causes of downtime and data loss at a country-specific level, the location and solutions used for off-site data back-up and storage, areas of IT spending on data storage and disaster recovery, and the primary reasons for wanting to move away from tape storage to alternative solutions in the cloud. Data Loss and Downtime According to the Disaster Recovery Survey 2012:  Asia Pacific and Japan, which was conducted by the research company Vanson Bourne and commissioned by EMC, the top three causes of data loss included data corruption, hardware issues, and power loss.  According to the study, 60 percent of IT decision makers indicated that hardware issues are the top reasons for downtime and data loss where 48 percent reported that corrupt data was the main cause for downtime and business disruptions. Almost 45 percent indicated that power loss was a primary cause of data loss and downtime with the highest percentage reported by IT decision makers from Singapore. The fact that there was a high percentage of people that reported power loss as a perpetrator of downtime points to the possibility of incorrect configurations in the data center level or a variable quality of IT infrastructure deployed in enterprises in addition to availability of high speed bandwidth.  This assumption originates from the fact power outages are rare in Singapore. 22 percent reported loss of power as the cause of data loss and downtime in Japan however; data corruption and hardware failure was cited at 52 percent.  The amount of data loss which occurred over the last 12 months was just less than 625GB. Data Storage Another key issue posed in the survey was use of data storage and off-site backup locations. 57 percent reported that off-site data storage is performed at another company location within the country.  IT decision makers also reported that a third party provider is used for data storage and backup in the same country as the company’s primary location. The highest response referred to the fact that enterprises are seeking cloud storage solutions and online backup as the result of the increased availability of high speed broadband.  In fact close to 70 percent of those respondents reported that they wanted to move away from tape backup to alternative data storage solutions due to the capability of faster backups (50%), durability and life cycle (41%) and the speed of data recovery and system restores (42%). Also because of the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of online backup, tape backup no longer makes sense when it comes to utilizing cloud storage solutions. The capability to reduce costs while increasing recovery speed, off-site backup in the cloud makes it difficult to justify tape backup. When it comes to cloud computing, disaster recovery allows critical infrastructure to be restored within minutes on a shared or private hosted platform. In terms of IT spending on disaster recovery, the study showed that most of the participants spend from anywhere from 10 to 12 percent of their budget on disaster recovery initiatives with over 50 percent obligated to have a disaster recovery plan in place to meet insurance and compliance guidelines and regulations. Despite the differences in how countries in the Asia Pacific region deal with data storage and backup, there is at least one commonality when compared with other enterprises in different parts of the world and that is to deal with an increasing amount of data to relocate within the same backup windows. According to the study, many enterprises in the Asia Pacific region still rely on tape backup systems (38%) or disks (38%). At the same token, the survey indicated that a high percentage of the enterprises (53%) have plans to migrate from tape to a faster and more efficient cloud solutions in order to improve data backup, storage and recovery initiatives.

Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation