* Investing in more bandwidth is an incomplete approach to strengthening disaster recovery plans, Forrester Research says
Throwing more bandwidth at a network is rarely a cure-all approach to improving performance. When it comes to disaster recovery objectives, it’s an equally inadequate strategy for making conditions better, new research suggests.
In a study on the impact of the WAN on disaster recovery capabilities, Forrester Research found that many IT executives resort to increasing bandwidth between sites, even though they know it’s not the best way to strengthen a company’s ability to recover from a disaster.
According to the report, a majority of the 504 enterprises polled aren’t protecting many of their remote sites from a local disaster because they’re not replicating or backing-up data to a central facility. “Only 16% of North American respondents and 15% of European respondents report that 80% or more of their remote sites are protected with centralized data replication or remote backup technologies,” the report states. “This means that enterprises are either relying on local backups and offsite tape vaulting for disaster recovery, or there is no disaster recovery solution in place at all.
Neither situation is good for enterprises in the event of an emergency, according to Forrester. “Offsite tape vaulting is error-prone and cumbersome, and it exposes the enterprise to the risk of lost or stolen tapes. Having no solution at all means that critical data could be lost in the event of a local business disruption.”
So are enterprises concerned about these risks? Yes, according to the research. More than 75% of respondents consider it critical to improve data recovery times and limit data loss at a backup data center and remote sites. Plus, a sizable percentage of respondents’ IT budgets — 21% on average — is earmarked for business continuity and disaster recovery efforts.
At the same time, more than 80% agree that “improving time to recovery and limiting data loss without increasing bandwidth is important.” Despite that realization, however, 63% of polled companies said that their current bandwidth prevents them from extending replication or remote backup protection to remote sites.
So there’s a bit of a disconnect there: Enterprises know emergency preparedness is not all about bandwidth, but seem stuck in the mindset that a lack of bandwidth is the problem.
Forrester suggests before investing in additional bandwidth to support remote sites, enterprises should consider WAN acceleration technologies to improve throughput and mitigate latency of existing networks (not a huge surprise given that F5 Networks commissioned the study).
It had this to say about selecting a vendor: “When evaluating WAN acceleration appliances, focus on the vendors that have made the time and investment to test the interoperability of their appliance with independent software vendors, storage vendors, and storage networking vendors.”
Forrester also urged enterprises “to undertake a business impact analysis to map the dependencies between critical business operations and the people, resources, applications, and physical IT assets they rely upon.”
If a business process needs to be restored in the event of a disruption, this step will help enterprises make certain they’re replicating and coordinating the recovery of all the dependent applications — so they don’t wind up only partially restoring a business process.
