IT departments under pressure to speed up data recovery, finds Veeam

Application downtime is costing businesses 1.3 million a year as IT departments fail to recover data quickly enough, according to Veeam.

The backup firm found that 82 per cent of the 760 CIOs it questioned are unable to meet business needs for always-on access to IT services, losing their companies an average of 1.3 million in lost revenue, productivity and unrecoverable data.

An overwhelming 90 per cent of those CIOs said they are under pressure to recover data faster to mitigate the cost of downtime, but also feel pressure to backup data more often to reduce the amount of data lost.

Ian Wells, VP of North West Europe at Veeam, told IT Pro: "Minimising data loss is as important as the time it takes you to get the system back up.

"If a system fails and you have it up and running in 10 minutes, great, but if you recover it to your last backup and it was taken 20 hours ago, you will have recovered back to a point with all the data in the last 20 hours lost.

"That could be 20 hours' worth of trading data. It could be 20 hours worth of customer transactions, how are you going to process those?"

CIOs told Veeam growing pressure from the business to have 'always-on' IT comes from trying to support more frequent, real-time customer interactions, cited by 65 per cent, followed by the need to access applications across different time zones, cited by 56 per cent.

Other reasons included rising adoption levels of mobile devices, cited by 56 per cent, while 54 per cent said staff were working irregular hours.

"Availability's becoming a big thing because business is becoming more demanding," said Wells. "We expect business now to be always on, so we as consumers expect to be able to transact with whichever company we choose at any time of the day and night."

But the study found IT departments are missing the business's recovery time objective (RTO) by more than an hour, and missing the recovery point objective (how often data is backed up - RPO) by 90 minutes.

However, Wells said the capability is there now to hit a 15-minute RTO and RPO, as Veeam announces version eight of its Availability Suite.

"Its about leveraging your data protection environment to provide more than data protection in the event of failure," he said, adding that the suite allows customers to trial new applications in a sandbox environment to test for bugs before taking it live, reducing the risk of a crash.

"Every time they take a backup effectively they're taking a complete clone of their production environment. We put that clone to work in a dedicated sandbox environment so you can do any type of testing you might want to do," he said.

"If something goes boom, it doesn't matter. You can investigate it, fix it, and when you know it's okay you can go and do that over in the production environment, migrating it in real time."