Disaster recovery still concerns businesses

Medium and large Australian organisations are still looking for ways to improve disaster recovery, according to a recent survey.
 
More than 53 percent of respondents were still looking for ways to improve disaster recovery.
 
Released by vendor StorageTek, the survey also found that 83.5 percent of respondents from large and medium-sized Australian businesses had data storage requirements and strategies which were driven by regulatory compliance.
 
The survey also found that storage consolidation and SAN implementation projects were at the top of the list of what companies planned to implement during the next 12 months.
 
Randy Chalfant, chief technologist at StorageTek, told iTnews that in the last year people had become increasingly aware of what the real questions about storage were, influenced by factors such as declining or flat IT budgets.
 
"So the way you go about doing it [is to] be a bit smarter about the way you're using storage," Chalfant said, using the example of processes such as ILM.
 
He argued that the pain points for organisations over the next 12 months would continue to be issues such as finding cost effective ways to manage business continuance, and finding ways to grow on a flat or declining budget.
 
StorageTek's survey found that 76 percent of respondents had either implemented or were assessing options for information lifecycle management (ILM) strategies. This involves "moving data through a storage hierarchy to match its changing value throughout its lifecycle", according to a statement from StorageTek.
 
Philip Belcher, managing director at StorageTek Australia/New Zealand, said disaster recovery concerns had peaked in the aftermath of September 11. "We are seeing a natural drop off in the number of organisations indicating a need for further improvements, but disaster recovery has now become a permanent feature of the storage landscape."
 
Storage consolidation, followed by ILM, were the methods most commonly used by respondents to control storage costs. "A year ago organisations were opting for less rigorous techniques, such as educating end users and aggressively deleting data," Belcher said. "Organisations are waking up to the risk of important business information disappearing in the rush to clear storage space."
 
The survey was carried out by StorageTek last month, with respondents made up of staff responsible for data storage or data centres in large and medium Australian companies.