Symantec recently carried out its annual IT Disaster Recovery survey of 1,000 or so IT managers across 15 countries. Now, there are a bunch of really interesting facts and it’s well worth a read, but the staggering revelation I think is that the number of applications that IT managers consider mission-critical has jumped 20% in the last year. We all know that apps like email have crept up on us and become really important to business over the last few years. But what I think is interesting is that at some point in the last 10 years IT has ceased to support the business and become the business! What do I mean - if the lights go out the business stops. The IT Disaster Recovery survey shows that on average 56% of applications are now considered mission-critical. Such a rapid increase may well pose considerable difficulties for, not just high availability but things we take for granted like Backup.
This is particularly true for those organisations who have implemented server virtualisation projects. It is dead easy to deploy virtual machines, but quite as simple to make sure they are backed up properly. I feel particularly sorry for those poor sods using either different backup solutions for backing up virtualised infrastructures or those who do not have an agent for virtualised environments. It must be a nightmare typing to write scripts for each virtual machine! Thank goodness we have Backup Exec! If you don’t know there is an offer on the Backup Exec Virtual Agent currently - runs to the end of June 2009, so if you upgrade to the latest Backup Exec 12.5 virtual agents and Save Up to 35% off !
Virtualisation is the major factor causing organisations to re-evaluate their disaster recovery plans today. A major challenge is deploying and maintaining the different tools for backup that are needed for their physical and virtual environments–indicating a need for tools that work across multiple operating systems and virtualisation technologies. The top challenge when backing up virtual systems involves resource constraints, which highlights the need for simplified and automated backup solutions that reduce manual tasks for administrators.
