StorageCraft, whose mission is to protect all data and ensure its constant availability, today announced it has proposed and submitted that, starting 2020, September 3 becomes annual World Data Recovery Day. While data backup is a standard practice throughout most organisations, what is not as well understood is the process and importance of data recovery.
Regular data backup is just one step in the business continuity process. A planned and tested data recovery process is critical.
With businesses reporting an average hourly cost of server downtime being between US$301,000 – US$400,000 per hour (approx. AU$496,591-AU$659,712 per hour) it is paramount that organisations are able to identify business-critical data and applications, and have an appropriate recovery plan in place.
Because not all data is of equal value to the core processes that keep a business running, organisations need to have an orchestrated recovery process from backup aligned to critical business requirements.
Many companies have not tested their recovery plans
Independent research study from Dimensional Research, commissioned by StorageCraft, shows that many organisations’ IT decision makers (ITDMs) are not sufficiently prepared for recovery should the need to restore from their data backup arise.
The study covered 709 IT decision makers with responsibility for data protection and storage solutions in companies with 100 – 2,500 employees. The ANZ findings illustrate the need for better business recovery preparedness.
- Only 14% of organisations can recover from severe data loss within an hour
- 41% of organisations have experienced data loss in the last year
- Close to a quarter of organisations with a recovery plan do not test it
- Organisations do not test recovery plans frequently. Nearly half (44%) of all organisations with recovery plans only test their plans once every 12 months or even less
- 38% of organisations mistakenly believe their public cloud services provider is responsible for data and application recovery in case of a ransomware attack or data loss
- 35% of IT decision makers believe being unable to manage data growth will make them more susceptible to security risk
Said Leo Lynch, Director, ANZ at StorageCraft “The business problem is no longer ‘if’ but ‘when’ and ‘how’ will a data outage happen. Data backup is absolutely important, but today, it’s simply table stakes. The most important question to ask is ‘how fast will we recover?’ and then to validate the answer.”
“With the introduction of World Data Recovery Day, we want to work with other industry leaders to raise urgent awareness that we are now in the ‘recovery era’! Our goal is to provide a focal point to educate IT leaders worldwide on best practices that help organisations ensure they are adequately prepared to deal with a possible – and likely – failure of their IT infrastructure.“
