By Fakir Balaji, IANS,
Singapore : Asian enterprises are way behind their counterparts in Europe and Americas in having IT disaster recovery plans as part of the ecosystem, a global survey commissioned by security solutions’ provider Symantec says.
The latest survey, whose findings were presented by Symantec India chief technology officer Basant Rajan at the company’s annual user conference here Tuesday, showed a decline in disaster recovery (DR) planning by companies in the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) region.
“In contrast, enterprises in the West are re-evaluating their DR plans due to virtualisation of their IT infrastructure to ensure their mission-critical applications and data are protected or recovered in quick downtime,” Rajan told about 1,000 delegates participating in the technology event.
In the computing world, virtualisation is creating a virtual version of a device or resource such as a server, storage, network and an operating system where the framework divides the resource into one or more execution environments unlike in the physical location.
The need to manage more applications and data in a virtual environment is compelling organisations to invest in disaster recovery centres through partners or third-party vendors.
Whereas in the APJ region, IT managers are found to be pessimistic on recovery times, as they are wary of the impact that investment in DR would have on their margins.
“One in three Asian enterprises are ill-equipped to deal with a disaster or attack because their IT executives are less involved in planning and testing,” Rajan said.
As against 40 percent of executives managing DR plans the world over, it is 34 percent in the APJ region though 92 percent of Asian businesses have tested their DR plans once since creation.
In 2007, executive involvement was 55 percent worldwide.
Asian companies are exposed to risks from inadequate DR planning and testing, as 30 percent of tests fail and 52 percent of them test their DR plans only once a year or less, the survey found.
“The increase in critical applications and growth of stored data in the physical and virtual environments have made DR plan imperative in the overall business strategy, as recovery of data and applications in case of a disaster – natural or manmade – is crucial for business operations,” Symantec chief technology officer Mark Bregman said.
Disaster recovery plans are not documents that collect dust on shelves.
One-third of the global enterprises surveyed had to execute their DR plans in the last 12 months due to factors such as hardware and software failure (36 percent), external security threats (28 percent), power outage (26 percent), natural disasters (23 percent), data leakage or loss (22 percent) and malicious employee behaviour.
“The scene is, however, changing in the APJ region, as companies realise the benefits of DR plans and increasing virtualisation to their operations and preventing loss of data or mission critical applications.
“We are seeing a greater realisation and acceptance of the need for DR plans and virtualisation in the APJ region, as their existing physical infrastructure suffered virus attacks (42 percent) and data loss (41 percent),” Rajan said.
The study, conducted in June-July by market research firm Applied Research West for the $6-billion Symantec, highlights business trends in DR planning and preparedness and insight into the challenges faced by organisations in developing and implementing DR plans.
The survey polled about 1,000 IT managers in organisations employing over 500 people and having DR plans in place across 15 countries, including seven in the APJ region – Japan, China, India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Korea.