Does Your IT Organization Measure Up in Data Protection & Recovery?

David Edborg

Volume-I in the Edborg-3-Step Process to Increase Confidence in Your Data Protection and Recovery Posture.

EMC has just released its latest update to its Global Data Protection Index on EMC.com.  Before you read the findings, where do you think your organization stands?  Are you in the Leaders, Adopters, Evaluators, or Laggards group?  Based on the scoring methodology used in the study, only 13% of the 3300 IT organizations from 26 countries in mid- to enterprise accounts were considered ahead of the curve.

So what does it take to be ahead of the curve?  What are the types of things the Leaders (2%) and Adopters (11%) do to score ahead of the curve?  Needless to say Laggards (37%) are behind the curve and Evaluators (50%) are too because they have yet to implement the technologies to put their organizations ahead of the curve.  (A detailed deck of the key findings can be found at on EMC’s Index microsite.)

Digging into the characteristics of the Leaders (scoring 75-100), data protection and recovery technologies they had in common were:

• Use archiving application with retention policies
• Disaster tolerant replication with near-zero RPO/RTO
• Recovery time one hour or less
• Very confident of ability to restore
• Standby or virtualized servers are core component of strategy

Adopters (scoring 51-100) too used leading technologies and were confident in their ability to restore and recover data.  Characteristics they had in common included:

• Archiving application with offsite replication
• Back up with deduplication & offsite replication
• Recovery time 2 – 5 hours
• Moderately confident of ability to restore
• Active-active instances are core component of strategy

I find the Evaluators group (scoring 26-50) to be the most interesting; by and large they using some of the best practice data protection technologies, but not necessarily leading edge.   Their organization’s IT decision-makers polled were overwhelmingly doubtful of the ability to restore and recover their organizations’ services.  How can that be?  An organization follows best practices, but yet there is doubt in the ability to recover?  The rest of the characteristics in common included:

• Archive to disk
• Back up to disk
• Recovery time 6 – 24 hours
• Doubtful of ability to restore
• Replication is core component of strategy

A FEW STRATEGIC CHANGES ALONG WITH SOME INVESTMENTS CAN CHANGE THE TRAJECTORY OF YOUR ORGANIZATION AND ACTUALLY REDUCE THE COST OF DATA PROTECTION AND RECOVERY GIVING YOUR ORGANIZATION CONFIDENCE IN THEIR ABILITY TO RECOVER.

Of course the Laggards group (scoring 1-25) have a lot of work to do as their IT leaders have no confidence in their ability to recover.  The characteristics that this group shared included:

• Archive to tape
• Back up to tape
• Recovery time more than one day
• Not confident in ability to restore
• Backup is core component of strategy

So if you work for an organization that’s in the Laggards or Evaluators groups what can you do to affect change?  Surprisingly not a lot.  A few strategic changes along with some investments can change the trajectory of your organization and actually reduce the cost of data protection and recovery giving your organization confidence in their ability to recover.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll unveil the Edborg 3-Step Method for transforming your data protection and recovery posture.

Does Your IT Organization Measure Up in Data Protection & Recovery?
David Edborg