Business

Wednesday September 2, 2009

Disaster recovery gains ground

By DALJIT DHESI


It becomes a priority for more Malaysian firms

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian companies are now more serious in investing in disaster recovery systems which are becoming a priority in their business operations amid the unfavourable economic climate.

US-based security and storage company Symantec Corp, which found this in its latest survey, attributed the trend to the increase in downtime costs and stringent information technology (IT) service level requirements.

Symantec Corp (M) Sdn Bhd managing director Suzie Tan said disaster recovery systems were gaining prominence in the business community as such systems ensured continuity of businesses, protected revenue and reduced downtime cost in the event of a disruption.

Suzie Tan ... ‘There has also been strong commitment from the executives.’

She added that Bank Negara had last year issued guidelines for financial services providers to have good business continuity management and disaster recovery plans.

Among others, the guidelines required such plans to be tested regularly and greater involvement by the board, she said.

In disclosing the survey findings, she said local companies in various sectors on average, allocated about 40% of their IT budget for disaster recovery plans.

The global survey was conducted in June and covered sectors such as financial services, telecommunications and the public sector.

From the 1,650 worldwide responses, 450 were from Asia Pacific and Japan.

“Although the budget for disaster recovery is expected to remain flat in the next 12 months, about 60% of local companies expect to increase their budget in the next two years.

“There has also been strong commitment from the executives of the companies, especially CEOs, on the importance of having sound disaster recovery systems,’’ Tan said during an interview.

The top three business threats affecting most organisations were computer system failure (80%), external computer threats (64%) and data leakages or losses (60%), she added.

The top three disaster impacts that concerned organisations the most for disaster recovery were damage to brand reputation (68%), data loss ( 64%) and decrease in employee productivity (52%).

Circumstances leading to companies adopting such systems were computer system failure, external computer threats and natural disasters.

According to the survey, the highest cost of downtime was in enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management – at US$2,500 per hour.

On disaster recovery testing, Tan said it was encouraging as 68% of companies conducted full-scenario testing and the average success rate of such tests in recovering critical data and applications within the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) was 80%.

RTO is the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster and RPO describes the acceptable amount of data loss in a specified time period.

To ensure an efficient data recovery plan, Tan advised companies to use automation and minimise human involvement, implement non-disruptive testing methods by using right technology, treat virtual environment the same as physical servers and decide on the appropriate approach according to the type of technology.

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