What is the future for IT Disaster Recovery?

A recent survey by the UK’s Chartered Management Institute showed that businesses of all sizes considered loss of IT to be the threat most likely to have an impact on costs and revenue, whilst also showing that it was the most commonly experienced disruption. Given this, why do so many organisations fail to prepare properly for IT disasters?

Well, the fact is that IT disaster recovery is complicated. Doing it well requires a lot of planning, and you’ll have to keep on updating the plan if it isn’t going to be totally useless by the time you want it. Testing the plan properly is almost never done, as it’s got a tendency to be ruinously time-consuming. This has left many with either cheap inadequate provisions or worse expensive provisions that fall short of protecting the business.

It’s not all bad, though, because, virtualisation – the IT buzzword at the moment – just might revolutionise the provision of disaster recovery. It’s got obvious benefits if you’re starting from scratch but, more interestingly, it also opens up a new set of strategies for companies big and small who aren’t proposing to completely reengineer their existing systems. Managed disaster recovery services based on virtualised recovery platforms have the potential to do something quite disruptive to the economics of outsourced recovery.

This means companies of all types can now get a much higher standard of service, at a drastically lower price, and with automatic testing, you’ll always know it’s working. Best of all, it’s simple, and you don’t need to keep updating the plan. So that’s nice – maybe your IT department could get on with something useful instead. Like running IT systems, for example.

To find out more, visit www.planbdr.co.uk