What’s Trending: The State of IT Disaster Recovery

The way that organizations handle Disaster Recovery (DR) is changing. According to a Gartner, Inc. report released April 30, 2020 by analysts Jerry Rozeman and Ron Blair entitled Survey Analysis: IT Disaster Recovery Trends and Benchmarks, “Gartner’s 2019 Global Security and Risk Survey provides organizations with key trends and benchmarks for modernizing their disaster recovery capabilities. I&O leaders must apply the insights from our survey analysis to improve their DR strategy and execution.” At Zerto, we’re always looking to better understand the evolving needs of our customers and prospects— it is of our opinion that this report resonated with our mission and confirmed many of the trends we see across our customers’ businesses. Read on for a big-picture look at how businesses are adapting their DR strategies, and how Zerto can help realize the benefits of those changes for your organization.

Disaster Recovery by the Numbers

As we all know, the need for effective DR solutions is growing. According to Gartner, “seventy-six percent of respondents reported an incident during the past two years that required an IT DR plan; more than 50% reported at least two incidents.” With these incidents on the rise, it’s no surprise that organizations are also looking to spend more to stay prepared: Gartner states “in 2020, 50% of organizations expect to spend at least 7% of their IT budget on disaster recovery (DR), compared to 30% in 2019.”

How will they be spending that money? According to the report, “cloud-based recovery continues to be the single most selected continuity method (among the eight DR solutions methods) for all tiers of IT services when organizations use a hot/warm DR strategy. However, organizations select cloud-based recovery as their first choice for only about 19% to 23% of their mission-critical, critical and important IT services across data bunker, cold and hot/warm recovery strategies. Thus, noncloud solutions remain the dominant DR strategy, supporting 75% to 80% of DR for all tiers of IT services.” Interestingly, larger companies (those with more than $1B in revenue) choose to use the cloud more often than smaller companies for their hot or warm DR strategies.

Organizations are also requiring more of their DR solutions, “about 50% of organizations report their shortest time frame for RTO for mission-critical, critical and important applications is four hours or less. Further, 24% to 29% expect an RTO of less than one hour, with minimal differences per recovery tier,” the report states. In addition, “thirty percent of organizations are using DR orchestration tools in full production.” We believe which can dramatically reduce the time and labor required when an incident occurs.

Getting Ahead of the Curve with Zerto

We’ve covered DR trends among enterprise organizations around the world, but what matters most is what that means for your organization—and how you can adjust your strategy to keep pace. Luckily, Zerto’s DR 101 eBook includes several useful recommendations to ensure your DR plans stay on the cutting edge:

• Understand the Cost of Downtime
  Many businesses underestimate just how costly lost time and data can be in the event of an outage or attack. Relying on daily backups means up to 24 hours’ worth of lost data, costing up to $273,000 per year for organizations with turnover of $100M per year. Regular snapshots are better, but still mean hours of lost data, costing that same company up to $45,000. With an always on, continuous solution, however, data loss is reduced to seconds, meaning costs of only $7,500 per year—a savings of over 97%. Curious how your company measures up? Try our Downtime Calculator now.
• Why Automation and Orchestration Matter
  Outages are not only costly because of lost data, but also due to the amount of time it takes to get back up and running. Making sure your DR solution includes automation tools drastically reduces the time it takes to recover your data and get back to business, saving your IT team’s time and allowing employees to return to work faster. Zerto orchestration tools also allow for impact less failover testing and reporting, ensuring that you know exactly what to expect in the event of a disaster and further reducing recovery time.
• Keep the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in Mind
  In deciding the best DR strategy for your organization, make sure that you factor in costs that are often overlooked. These include the costs of snapshot storage on both your source and target sites, the expense of manual recovery without automation, and unnecessary spending on inflexible array-based solutions due to vendor lock-in.

While knowing what needs to change for your organization to remain disaster-ready is one thing, making it happen is another. Our IT Resilience Platform is flexible enough to protect your existing on-premises data—and cloud-ready when you decide to make the switch.

Our platform also utilizes Continuous Data Protection, meaning your data is saved as changes are made, minimizing data loses and ensuring your organization is always prepared for a disruption. Plus, getting back to business after a disruption takes only minutes, allowing your organization to achieve RTOs well under the minimally acceptable. More than that, because the IT Resilience Platform comes with built-in orchestration and automation tools, you can save time, money, and resources both in the event of a disruption and in keeping up with day-to-day maintenance—or, most importantly, when making a major change to your organization’s DR strategy.

Staying IT resilient is an ongoing task. The security threats, demands, and requirements placed on organizations are constantly changing in new and unexpected ways. However, by leveraging the power of the Zerto IT Resilience Platform to keep up with the latest DR trends, you can ensure that your organization doesn’t fall behind the competition—and is prepared for whatever the future holds.

Want more information on what matters in IT Disaster Recovery? Read the DR 101 eBook to see how DR is changing—and how Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform can help your organization can get ahead of the curve.