With DRJ Fall World, currently in progress in San Diego,we thought we’d write another post about one of the hottest storage-related topics this year – disaster recovery. The title of the post was influenced by a recent writeup by 451 Group analyst Simon Robinson, who noted that three disruptive trends (disk, virtualization and the Cloud) “have fundamentally changed the nature of data protection and, accordingly, delivered new value to enterprises.”
This is even more true for SMBs, especially when it comes to DR.
These disruptive changes have transformed the market, making enterprise-class DR services more affordable for resource-constrained SMBs, who in the past were relegated to either setting up a costly second data center and/or storing backup tapes offsite and crossing their fingers they’d be able to restore both their critical servers AND data quickly in the event of a site disaster.
This disruption is taking place just at the right time. A recent report from Forrester Research found that the “misperception of BC/DR spending is changing because organizations have become better at identifying and measuring risks, have a better understanding of economic impact of disasters and less tolerance for downtime and data loss. Also, more regulations and questions from partners and customers about disaster recovery preparedness are prompting companies to take DR more seriously.”
In addition:
More than 70% of the 1,228 SMB budget decision makers in the Forrester’s “Global IT budgets, priorities, and emerging technology tracking survey Q2 2010″ said upgrading disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities is likely to be a top technology priority over the next 12 months. Of 1,575 enterprise decision makers, more than 60% said DR/BC — second in the survey behind consolidating IT infrastructure.
So embrace the disruption because it’s making “enterprise-class DR available to companies of all sizes, and making it much faster, easier and less expensive.” And that’s a good thing….
Tags: cloud, disaster recovery, dowtime, DR, Remote Disaster Recovery, SMB, virtualization
