Published on the 24/11/2010 | Written by Newsdesk
A Symantec survey reveals many virtual systems in Australia and New Zealand are not properly protected…
The study highlights that nearly half of the data on virtual systems is not regularly backed up and only one quarter of respondents in Australia and New Zealand use replication and failover technologies to protect virtual environments. Respondents also indicated that 47 percent of virtualised servers in Australia and New Zealand are not covered in their current disaster recovery plans.
Symantec says its survey demonstrates the growing challenge of managing disparate virtual, physical and cloud resources because of added complexity for organisations protecting and recovering mission critical applications and data. In addition, the study shows that virtual systems are not properly protected.
Inadequate tools, security and control
Using multiple tools that manage and protect applications and data in virtual environments causes major difficulties for data centre managers. In particular, two thirds in Australia and New Zealand who encountered problems protecting mission-critical applications in virtual and physical environments reported this to be a large challenge for their organisation.
In terms of cloud computing, global and local respondents reported that their organisations run approximately 50 percent of mission-critical applications in the cloud. Locally, 94 percent report that security is the main concern when putting applications in the cloud. However, the biggest disaster recovery challenge respondents face when implementing cloud computing and storage is the ability to control failovers and make resources highly available – 93 percent in Australia and New Zealand.
Resource and storage constraints hamper backup
The respondents from Australia and New Zealand state that 93 percent of backups occur only weekly or less frequently, rather than daily. Resource constraints, lack of storage capacity and incomplete adoption of advanced and more efficient protection methods hamper rapid deployment of virtual environments. In particular:
• 95 percent of respondents identified resource constraints (people, budget and space) as the top challenge when backing up virtual machines.
• 94 respondents state that the lack of available primary storage and backup storage (96 percent) hampers protecting mission critical data.
• 27 percent of respondents use advanced methods (clientless) to reduce the impact of virtual machine backups.
The downtime and recovery gap
The study showed that the time required to recover from an outage is twice as long as respondents perceive it to be. When asked if a significant disaster were to occur at their organisation that destroyed the main data centre, respondents indicated that:
• Respondents expected to be up and running two hours after an outage.
• This is an improvement from 2009, when they reported it would take four hours to be up and running after an outage.
• The median downtime per outage in the last 12 months was six hours, more than doubling the two hour expectation.
• Organisations in Australia and New Zealand experienced on average six downtime incidents in the past 12 months, as opposed to a global average of four incidents.
Major causes of downtime
When asked what caused their organisation to experience downtime over the past five years, respondents reported their outages were mainly from system upgrades, power outages and failures, cyberattacks and natural disasters. Specifically:
• 93 percent of respondents experienced an outage from system upgrades, resulting in 27 hours of downtime.
• 63 percent of respondents experienced an outage from power outages and failures, resulting in 26 hours of downtime.
• 53 percent of respondents experienced an outage from cyberattacks over the past 12 months resulting in 38 hours of downtime locally and 52.7 hours globally.
• Respondents from Australia and New Zealand cited natural disasters such as fires (93 percent), tsunamis (35 percent) and hurricanes (32 percent) as major causes of outages.
