Sponsored by Quest Software, a company whose objective is to simplify difficult IT problems, the main cause is that many SMBs simply find disaster recovery too difficult. There is still a reliance on file back-up to tape, while concepts such as disk virtualization and mirroring are considered hard and expensive. As a result, formal recovery plans are patchy and the recovery time objectives (RTO) are lengthy.
But, given ever-increasing cyber attacks and continuous natural disasters, “planning for failure shouldn’t be an afterthought or overlooked by any organization, regardless of size,” says Quest’s VP and GM Kevin Nolan. “Information is integral to the success of every organization and companies should do more to keep their most important asset protected.”
The possible solutions to this problem suggested by the report include greater use of virtualization (too difficult, although Quest offers its own solutions) and the use of hosted services (too expensive).
Brian Packer, COO of data centre hosting company BIS, believes that virtualization and hosting are neither too expensive nor too difficult. “This idea is now redundant. Affordable virtualization technologies are bringing business continuity solutions into the reach of SMBs.” Furthermore, he adds, the ‘difficulty’ is transferred to the hosting company. “By deploying these technologies into dual site, high availability data centers, end user IT services are dynamically load balanced between computing resources in real-time. Such environments can easily accommodate both individual component or entire site failures by shifting processing power to the remaining computing resources and routing traffic around any failed network paths.”
Carlos Escapa, the CEO of VirtualSharp Software, believes that SMBs are still relying “disproportionately on legacy technologies like backup for disaster recovery” largely because they fear the cost of a secondary data centre. He believes that the solution lies in virtualization, and that “once SMBs start, they virtualize much faster than larger companies.”
The problem for Quest Software and the rest of the industry, then, is in educating SMBs in both the absolute need for a formal disaster recovery plan, and the cost-effective solutions available.