The challenge of managing virtual and cloud environments as well as physical ones is adding complexity to disaster recovery (DR) efforts — sometimes resulting in inadequate protection. That’s the conclusion of the sixth annual Disaster Recovery Study from Symantec, a Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of security, storage and systems management solutions.
The global report found that 44 percent of data on virtual systems is not routinely backed up, and only 20 percent of respondents use replication and failover technologies in virtual environments. Sixty percent of virtualized servers are not in the DR plans of those surveyed, an increase from 45 percent in last year’s report.
The Challenge of Multiple Tools
The report found that “using multiple tools that manage and protect applications and data in virtual environments causes major difficulties for data-center managers.” It found the effort to be a “large challenge” for 58 percent.
Dan Lamorena, director of Symantec’s Storage and Availability Management Group, said his company expects to see organizations “adopt tools that provide a holistic solution with a consistent set of policies across all environments.” The keys for data-center managers, he said, are simplification, standardization and treating “all environments the same.”
Toward those aims, Lamorena recommended using integrated tool sets, simplifying data-protection processes, prioritizing planning and tools to “automate and perform processes which minimize downtime during system upgrades,” identifying issues as quickly as possible, and avoiding shortcuts that could have “disastrous consequences.”
Since the study found that about half of mission-critical applications are being run in the cloud, inadequate DR planning poses a major problem. The respondents recognize that fact, with 66 percent reporting that security is their chief concern about using the cloud.
Backup Frequency, Outages
About 80 percent of backups take place weekly or less frequently, instead of daily. Resource constraints, including people, budget and space, were the biggest issue, with…