Nine out of 10 IT professionals are confident in their cloud-based disaster recovery strategy, compared to the 74 per cent who use on-premises disaster recovery solutions, reveals the Zetta State of Disaster Recovery Survey.
Of the 403 IT professionals surveyed, 96 per cent report having a disaster recovery solution. Half of the respondents are using at least some aspects of the cloud, with nine per cent using cloud-only and 41 per cent using cloud and on-premises. 46 per cent have on-premises or physical based disaster recovery. 4 per cent have no disaster recovery whatsoever.
In the past five years, more than half of the companies who responded reported having a downtime event of at least eight hours. In the case of a site outage, for every day of downtime, two-thirds of respondents reported they would lose more than $20,000, with eight per cent saying they would lose more than $500,000.
The majority of downtime events come from power outages and hardware error, but a third of those surveyed answered that human error and virus or malware attacks were the reason of their downtime.
“While many think of disaster recovery as preparing for catastrophic natural events, most IT downtime can be caused by simple power outages, hardware and human errors, and increasingly, security vulnerabilities,” said Mike Grossman, CEO of Zetta.
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One third of respondents say they are planning to update their disaster recovery solution in the next 12 months. When shopping for a disaster recovery solution, more than half of the IT professionals ranked reliability as the most important factor, followed by the speed of recovery, cost, usability, and simplicity.
Despite being confident with the solution they choose, more than half of the respondents believe that disaster recovery solutions are too expensive, while a third believe they’re too difficult to use.
Difficulty in use may factor in the slow adoption of a disaster recovery plan, as two in five companies don’t have one. When it comes to testing these plans, 40 per cent test them once a year, 26 per cent once a quarter, and six per cent once a month. Nearly a quarter only test their plans rarely, and six per cent don’t test them at all.