Feature: Shedding risk

Users eye cloud for storage and disaster recovery

A hurdle for companies, when looking at adopting a business continuity strategy, is understanding what the challenges and needs of the business really are. Sometimes there can be a disconnection between the IT team and the business, says Martin. It comes down understanding what the Recovery Time Objectives are – how long the system can be down – and Recovery Point Objective – the point in time when data should be restored following a business continuity incident. If the business understands this, it can look at what the real cost to the business is and then justify what form of disaster recovery it requires, he says.

Economic dip forces efficiency
The recent economic downturn has definitely had an impact on the business continuity space, but on the whole, it’s a good thing, says EMC’s Patterson. Tighter IT budgets have meant many can’t afford the solutions they really want right now, but it has also created smarter thinking around storage and disaster recovery, he says. A lot of businesses are future proofing their systems by ensuring they can add the business continuity part once their budget allows it.

“Finally, businesses are taking into account the cost of doing nothing,” he says. “What are the risks of continuing with the infrastructure as it is today?”

“If anything, the economic slowdown has provided IT departments with the opportunity to get their house in order,” says Hitachi’s De Luca. “We are working with organisations across New Zealand to improve business policies and help deploy technologies such as storage virtualisation and dynamic provisioning to provide an agile IT environment. We are finding organisations are able to generate a 25 to 30 percent saving by undertaking this strategy.”

The recession has also led to an increased interest in storage efficiency. In the past six months, organisations have become more focused on storage efficiency and being smarter about how they store, manage and protect their data, and less focused on performance, says Martin.

Many customers are looking at pooling of storage resources, not only to achieve greater utilisation of their storage, but also to reduce power and cooling requirements, making the environment more efficient to manage.