Disaster recovery on double duty

That's because the global electronics distributor weaves its disaster recovery requirements into its broader business objectives and its SLAs with its 15,000 users. Since 2010, the IT shop has been cutting costs and meeting its service and disaster recovery commitments by using a hybrid cloud made up of its own virtualized hardware at colocation facilities in Chicago, Frankfurt, and Singapore.

More and more IT shops are using technologies like virtualization and replication to make disaster recovery just another service, at times using the same servers, network, and storage that run order entry, email, application development, or other services. This merges what historically were disaster recovery and business continuity efforts, protecting the business against not only rare disasters, nevertheless also human error or equipment failures.

More demands, more riskThese changes are driven by ongoing pressure to cut costs during maintaining continual uptime, and by the flexibility provided by server, storage, and network virtualization. In the meantime, a recent spate of natural disasters, along with stricter regulatory requirements, has made disaster recovery the No. 1 subject of client inquiries at innovation firm Gartner, says analyst John Morency.

However, Forrester Technology reports that enterprise disaster recovery/business continuity budgets are stuck at 6 percent of total IT capital and operating budgets and that concerns just as "consolidation, business intelligence and virtualization" are given higher priority when it comes to spending.

Meanwhile, the list of critical services that need protection keeps growing, with communication tools like VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and email gaining "critical" status alongside traditional business applications like order entry and ERP. In short, it's necessary to ensure uptime not only afterwards major disasters, however also after all of localized failures, and many companies need the ability to quickly recover just one file to put it more exactly than an entire system.

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