Datrium, today released findings from its industry report on the State of Enterprise Data Resiliency and Disaster Recovery 2019, which assesses how organizations are implementing disaster recovery (DR) to protect their data from attack or disaster.
Findings suggest that organizations are growing more concerned about the threat of disaster as a result of ransomware, human error, power failure and natural disaster. The heightened threat of ransomware is particularly concerning for the enterprise data center, with nearly 90% of companies considering ransomware a critical threat to their business, and this is driving the need for DR.
The research also found that the public cloud is increasingly being considered as a DR site. The cloud offers greater ease of use and cost-efficient DR, solving several pain points that are holding organizations back from responding to DR events including the complexity of DR products and processes as well as high associated costs.
The State of Enterprise Data Resiliency and Disaster Recovery 2019 study was developed to identify what DR solutions businesses currently utilize, their confidence in those solutions and how effective the solutions are at helping businesses return to normal operations following a disaster, in addition to the key capabilities IT teams consider when evaluating and selecting a DR solution to create their DR plan.
“This research confirms that ransomware is one of the biggest concerns for IT managers today,” said Tim Page, CEO of Datrium. “This threat is significantly driving people to reevaluate their DR plans. It’s no surprise that more than 88% of respondents said they’d use the public cloud for their DR site if they could pay for it only when they need to test or run their DR plans.”
As the nucleus of an enterprise, the data center must be protected from the threat of disaster or deliberate attacks. But half (50.4%) of all organizations surveyed have recently said to have experienced a DR event and 36% of respondents identified ransomware to be the primary cause for a DR event in a Enterprise Data Center.
Traditional DR approaches are lacking. Two significant challenges faced by more than half of organizations who experienced a DR event in the past 24 months were the difficulty of both failover to their DR location and failback.
The industry norm today is to have physical sites for DR, however the industry is shifting toward DR in the public cloud. The vast majority (88.1%) of respondents said they would use the public cloud as their DR site if they would only have to pay for it when they need it. The most common approach to DR according to more than half (52.7%) of respondents is having more than one physical DR site.
Nearly one in four respondents (23%) stated that their organization is not responding to DR events as effectively as it could be. The complexity of DR products and processes, high associated costs and lack of staff skilled in managing DR are the prime causes that are holding organizations back from responding to DR events.
Another important finding is that 74.9% of respondents stated that their DR budget has increased over the past 12 months, and 21% reported that the increase was significant. In light of growing threats, nearly three-quarters of IT leaders expect their DR budget to increase in the next 24 months.
