New Study Finds Many Businesses Are Not Prepared For Disaster - And Virtualization Could Be To Blame

AUSTIN, Texas, June 5, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Neverfail®, the leading global business IT continuity management company, today released survey results revealing the lingering – and potentially devastating – gaps that virtualization can create in disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) planning and operations, particularly for enterprise application availability. The findings highlight the potential risks of virtualization if not factored into a comprehensive disaster recovery and business strategy.

The research, which is based on surveys of 252 IT professionals, found that while virtualization is being widely implemented, it is often being done at the expense of availability and continuity of physical servers. These results illustrate the need for businesses to ensure their entire underlying IT infrastructure – both virtual and physical – is appropriately managed and protected in order to keep their operations up and running in the case of disaster or downtime.

Key findings include:

• Heterogeneous deployments dominate. 44 percent of businesses deploy their critical applications across both physical and virtual servers; while 24 percent are still housing the majority of their critical apps on physical servers alone. Only four percent of businesses house all critical applications virtually.
• Risk does not discriminate – at least by perception. 47 percent of respondents believe virtual and physical servers carry the same level of downtime risk.
• What you don't know can hurt you. 70 percent of businesses only update their DR plan every one to five years. What's more, one third of businesses only test their DR plan once every 12 months; and 17 percent admit they never test their plans.
• An accident waiting to happen. 81 percent of businesses reported problems during their last DR testing.

"With today's evolving and agile infrastructure, businesses need to do more than simply develop a BC/DR plan and hope disaster never strikes," said Martin Mackay, CEO of Neverfail. "Moving to a fully-virtualized environment doesn't happen overnight. As a result, many applications live in a kind of limbo, with some components on physical servers and other in the cloud during the migration. The dynamic nature of virtualization, which offers benefits such as lower costs and increased automation, also makes it harder to keep DR plans up-to-date, putting critical operations at risk. The findings demonstrate that gaps exist, and in order to maintain continuous availability, businesses must take the proper steps to close them."

Today's organizations are learning through experience that virtualization and other partial solutions, such as backup and continuous data replication, do not provide sufficient and comprehensive IT continuity management solutions. Neverfail's survey demonstrates that increased pressures on IT leaders to reduce cost and manage complexity often results in a disaster recovery and business strategy riddled with gaps that are potentially disastrous to a business's IT continuity. 

Methodology
Osterman Research conducted 252 online surveys of IT decision makers and influencers across a range of industries. Respondents were selected from both the Osterman Research survey panel as well as an external panel.  

About Neverfail
Neverfail is a leading global IT continuity management company. For more than 12 years, Neverfail has worked to make business continuity simple and help businesses around the world prepare for and protect themselves from disaster without missing a beat. Neverfail's software monitors critical systems and automatically mitigates any potential threats. With Neverfail, customers around the world benefit from enhanced infrastructure flexibility, decreased risk and cost, assured compliance and no user downtime. Neverfail, a US Managed Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is a consistent and active early adopter participant and contributor in all mission-critical Microsoft applications. For more information, visit: www.neverfailgroup.com.

Contact:
Kristin Parran Faulder
InkHouse (for Neverfail)
Tel: 781-966-4126            
Email: [email protected]

Neverfail is a trademark of Neverfail Group Limited. All other trademarks, including Microsoft, Windows, and Exchange, are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2013 Neverfail Group Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, transcribed, or translated into any language or computer language, in any form or by any means without prior express, written consent of Neverfail Group Limited.

SOURCE Neverfail