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Inadequate Tools, Security and Control
Using multiple tools that manage and protect applications and data in virtual environments causes major difficulties for data center managers. In particular, nearly six in 10 of these respondents (58%) who encountered problems protecting mission-critical applications in virtual and physical environments reported this to be a large challenge for their organization.
In terms of cloud computing, respondents reported that their organization runs approximately 50% of mission-critical applications in the cloud. Two-thirds of respondents (66%) report that security is the main concern of putting applications in the cloud. However, the biggest challenge respondents face when implementing cloud computing and storage is the ability to control failovers and make resources highly available (55%).
Resource and Storage Constraints Hamper Backup
Respondents state that 82% of backups occur only weekly or less frequently, rather than daily. Resource constraints, lack of storage capacity, and incomplete adoption of advanced and more efficient protection methods hamper rapid deployment of virtual environments. In particular:
- 59% of respondents identified resource constraints (people, budget, and space) as the top challenge when backing up virtual machines.
- Respondents state that the lack of available primary (57%) and backup storage (60%) hampers protecting mission critical data.
- 50% of respondents use advanced methods (clientless) to reduce the impact of virtual machine backups.
The Downtime and Recovery Gap
The study showed that the time required to recover from an outage is twice as long as respondents perceive it to be. When asked if a significant disaster were to occur at their organization that destroyed the main data center, respondents indicated that:
- They expected the downtime per outage to be two hours to be up and running after an outage.
- This is an improvement from 2009, when they reported it would take four hours to be up and running after an outage.
- The median downtime per outage in the last 12 months was five hours, more than doubling the two hour expectation.
- Organizations experienced on average four downtime incidents in the past 12 months.
Major Causes of Downtime
When asked what caused their organization to experience downtime over the past five years, respondents reported their outages were mainly from system upgrades, power outages and failures and cyberattacks. Specifically:
- 72% experienced an outage from system upgrades, resulting in 50.9 hours of downtime.
- 70% experienced an outage from power outages and failures, resulting in 11.3 hours of downtime.
- 63% experienced an outage from cyberattacks over the past 12 months resulting in 52.7 hours of downtime.
The study also showed a gap between those organizations that experience power outages and failures and those who have conducted an impact assessment for power outages and failures: Surprisingly, only 26% of respondents' organizations have conducted a power outage and failure impact assessment.
"While organizations are adopting new technologies such as virtualization and the cloud to reduce costs and enhance disaster recovery efforts, they are currently adding more complexity to their environments and leaving mission critical applications and data unprotected," said Anthony Harrison, Senior Principal Solutions Specialist - Storage and Server Management, Symantec. "We expect to see organizations adopt tools that provide a holistic solution with a consistent set of policies across all environments. Data center managers should simplify and standardize so they can focus on fundamental best practices that help reduce downtime."
Posted by Rima Ali Al Mashni
