State Of Enterprise Disaster Recovery Preparedness: Q3 2009

Although disaster recovery (DR) was once considered an expensive insurance policy for rare but catastrophic events such as hurricanes and terrorist activity, Forrester survey data suggests that enterprises across North America and Europe are now moving beyond basic DR preparedness. Our data shows that the majority of enterprises have at least one recovery data center and that enterprises are finally increasing the distance between their production and recovery data centers. It also shows that enterprises are maximizing their DR investments by using their recovery data center for multiple purposes, including application development and even some production workloads. These trends support the continued migration toward more active-active data center configurations. In addition, a large percentage of enterprises that use fixed-site recovery services from a DR services provider are using dedicated IT infrastructure. For IT operations professionals still recovering from tape, this is a clear call to move to more advanced recovery solutions, whether you have an in-house solution or use a DR services provider.