Research Finds 23 Percent of IT Pros Include Cloud Services in Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plans
InformationWeek Reports, a service for peer-based IT research and analysis, announced the release of its latest research report. Cloud's Role in BC/DR encompasses analysis of results from InformationWeek's 2011 Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Survey and guides readers in using cloud services to improve their BC/DR strategies. Four hundred and fourteen business technology professionals responded to the survey. The report explores the role these services can play in disaster recovery, including archiving/backups and spinning up critical systems in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) if on-premises facilities are devastated. The full report is available free to registered users at http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/2/8561/Business-Continuity/research-bc-dr-and-the-cloud.html.
Among survey respondents with or planning to implement a business continuity/disaster recovery plan, 23 percent have incorporated cloud services into their BC/DR strategy and 28 percent will do within within 24 months. The remaining 49 percent have no plans.
52 percent of respondents with no plans to use cloud services identify security as the main inhibitor.
48 percent of those with or who are planning to implement a business continuity/disaster recovery plan are using or open to using a cloud-based backup service for mission-critical application data.
49 percent of respondents using or considering a cloud-based backup service for their mission-critical application data say it would reduce their disaster recovery time.
9 percent of respondents with or planning to implement a business continuity/disaster recovery plan are using the cloud for remote or branch office backup; an additional 38 percent would consider it.
The report author, Kurt Marko, is an InformationWeek and Network Computing contributor and IT industry veteran.
"It's not surprising that respondents are still resistant to public cloud storage services," said Lorna Garey, content director of InformationWeek Reports. "Highly publicized outages spook conservative IT teams, and heavy use of virtualization makes it easier to add redundancy at a branch office or secondary data center. But used judiciously, service providers can add value—an example is backing up mobile devices."