They may not think so, but many Australian businesses are critically under-prepared for a disaster. Developments in disaster recovery are opening up markets for channel players who can provide customers with the resilience and ability to recover that they need in the face of a calamity.
Australia's small to medium businesses have an unwarranted confidence that they're prepared for a disaster, according to Symantec's 2009 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey. The average SMB has had three outages within the past year through incidents such as power failures, virus or hacker attacks and accidental data loss.
Ninety-three percent of respondents in Australia and New Zealand are somewhat/very satisfied with their disaster recovery plans, even though 30 percent have no plans in place to deal with such disruptions, the survey found. Only one-third of businesses surveyed back up their data daily, and half would lose 40 percent of their data if their computing systems were wiped out in a fire. Should disaster strike, a quarter of those businesses surveyed concede it would probably drive their customers into the arms of their competitors.
Figures vary, but it's clear a significant number of businesses hit by a disaster never open their doors again, or fail within several years. From the channel's perspective, it's not good for business to have your customers go out of business.
Of most interest to the channel is that the Symantec survey found around 90 percent of companies that did not have a disaster plan said they would introduce one within the next six months.
IT-based disaster recovery might help customers get their essential systems back online in a hurry, but it also offers channel partners the opportunity to talk about wider business continuity planning.
It's easy to forget how vulnerable a modern business is to external forces. What would your customers do if their premises lost power, water or gas? What if a virus, human error or act of sabotage took down their IT systems or telecommunications? It only takes one slip with a jackhammer and an entire city block could be without essential services for a week.
When we talk about disasters, we're not just talking about fire, flood and pestilence of biblical proportions. What would your customers do if they just couldn't access their business premises for a few hours - or a few days?
Fire and flood are obvious risks, but anything from a chemical spill or virus outbreak to an accident or a serious crime could see staff left standing on the footpath. What if it was the staff that was unavailable? A flu epidemic could keep them housebound for a week, or a union dispute could see them walk off the job. Perhaps a transport strike or petrol shortage could see them unable to make their daily commute to the office.
None of these scenarios is unrealistic and all of them are beyond our control. The odds of any one of them happening might be low, but when you combine all the potential threats the risk becomes significant - and that's before you take into account the really unlikely events such as natural disaster or social unrest. The channel shouldn't wait until its customers suffer from a disaster before discussing disaster recovery with them.
"Disaster recovery is really an insurance policy against an event you hope is never going to happen," says Intelligent Business Research Services analyst Kevin McIsaac.
"It's not very popular because, like a lot of insurance policies, disaster recovery is only valuable when the disaster strikes. So in my experience most people are under-prepared for disasters, particularly smaller organisations.
"They either don't have a disaster recovery plan in place at all, or they don't have sufficient data recovery in place and they haven't really gone and tested their disaster recovery plans."
Let's get unphysical
Virtualisation on Intel-based hardware is "the best thing that's happened to disaster recovery in the last 20 years", McIsaac says.
"Virtualisation actually solves a bundle of problems simultaneously. Most people I speak to about virtualisation tend to fixate on the cost savings that come from consolidation. Once you've rolled out virtualisation then aspects such as high availability, disaster recovery and rapid provisioning are the real benefits.
"They give the business real value and you don't really have to pay for them because the consolidation aspect pays for the whole thing," McIsaac says.
"In terms of disaster recovery, virtualisation makes it simpler and much faster. One benefit is that you can easily utilise hardware at other sites as the hardware doesn't have to be exactly the same - and that's a big deal.
"Equally importantly, it doesn't matter if your production servers are physical or virtual. Nor does it matter if your recovery environment is a physical or virtual machine. When disaster strikes it's easy to rebuild servers on the fly, in any location and any environment."
While virtualisation has a lot to offer in terms of disaster recovery, it presents both challenges and opportunities. Many organisations have embraced virtualisation for the cost benefits while giving little thought to disaster recovery for their virtual environment.
A third of Australian and New Zealand organisations do not test virtual environments as part of their disaster recovery initiatives, according to Symantec's disaster preparedness survey. Additionally, around a third of the data on virtualised systems are not regularly backed up. Over half of the respondents cited the lack of backup storage capacity and automated recovery tools as top challenges to protecting data in virtual environments.
When businesses approach virtualisation with disaster recovery in mind, it actually takes a lot of the pain out of testing their disaster recovery systems, McIsaac says.
"The great thing about building your disaster recovery plans around virtualisation is that you can easily enact your disaster recovery plans in a virtual environment. It thinks it's a live production machine during testing, but the truth is it's locked down and contained inside its own environment," he says.
"Another benefit of virtualisation is that it's much easier to replicate the current versions of your production systems, because they can be spun up virtually from up-to-date images. In a purely physical environment, there's a lot more work involved in ensuring recent changes to your production environment are reflected in your backup environment."
Symantec's disaster preparedness survey paints a grim picture for many SMBs should disaster strike.As such, it's clear disaster recovery offers excellent growth opportunities for channel partners looking to strengthen their relationship with customers, says Paul Lancaster, Symantec's director of systems engineering for Australia and New Zealand.
"The average cost of downtime for enterprise is $500,000 per incident. Even for SMBs we're talking about $15,000 to $30,000 per incident," Lancaster says. "Clearly there is a lot of work to be done in terms of disaster recovery awareness and preparedness. When you consider the costs of downtime as well as the benefits of virtualisation and the flexibility it brings, the channel has a very compelling disaster recovery story to sell.
"In our surveys, we found 25 percent of all disaster recovery tests have failed - mainly a mixture of human error and hardware failure. As such we strongly recommend SMB customers engage a trusted adviser when it comes to areas such as disaster recovery. It's a great area for channel partners to get involved with because it ties in with a lot of aspects of a customer's business, from virtualisation and high availability to security.
"It's the next step up from purely selling licences or selling hardware - we're talking about consulting services, implementation planning and perhaps even hosting the customer's data and monitoring their security and storage."
Acronis national sales manager Simon Howe agrees that disaster recovery offers channel partners the opportunity to open up new dialogues with customers. "The general discussion with customers is around data availability - their mindset seems to be more focused on ensuring uptime rather than recovering from downtime. Of course such a conversation can lead to best practices around backup, data recovery and disaster recovery," Howe says.
"Once the conversation turns to disaster recovery, everything is happening around virtualisation, deduplication, cloud computing and the flexibility of storage. These aspects are facilitating better disaster recovery processes and allowing SMBs to approach disaster recovery more strategically."
Both Acronis' Howe and Symantec's Lancaster agree disaster recovery systems can benefit from the improvements in data deduplication - significantly reducing backup sizes by ensuring the same file isn't backed up multiple times.
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