Symantec Research Reveals IT Spending More on DR Yet Vulnerable in Testing, Virtual Environments

CUPERTINO, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 06/30/09 -- Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced the global results of its fifth annual IT Disaster Recovery survey, which demonstrates rising DR pressures on organizations caused by soaring downtime costs and more stringent IT service level requirements to mitigate risk to the business. The study also shows that while DR budgets are higher in 2009, they are expected to remain flat over the next few years -- requiring IT professionals to do more with the same or less.

The survey highlights that while recovery time objectives were reduced to 4 hours in 2009, disaster recovery testing and virtualization are still major challenges for organizations. Respondents report that DR testing increasingly impacts customers and revenue, and one in four tests fail. Nearly a third of organizations don't test virtual environments as part of their disaster recovery plans, and a slightly larger percentage of virtual environments aren't regularly backed up -- pointing to the need for more automation and cross-environment tools.

Downtime costs are significant
The average cost of executing/implementing disaster recovery plans for each downtime incident worldwide according to respondents is US $287,600. In North America, the median cost can climb to as high as $900,000. Globally, this number is highest for healthcare and financial services organizations. In North America, the median cost for financial institutions is $650,000.

This is alarming when one considers that one in four tests failed and 93 percent of organizations have had to execute on their disaster recovery plans. Respondents reported that it takes on average three hours to achieve skeleton operations after an outage, and four hours to be up and running. This is dramatically improved over the 2008 findings, where only three percent of respondents reported that they could achieve skeleton operations within 12 hours, and 31 percent believed they would have baseline operations within one day.

2009 DR spending bucks trend
The research shows that the annual median budget for disaster recovery initiatives, including backup, recovery, clustering, archiving, spare servers, replication, tape, services, disaster recovery plan development and offsite costs at data centers surveyed is $50 million. According to respondents, this number will continue to grow throughout 2009, but more than half (52 percent) of respondents believe that budgets will be flat in 2010, making it more challenging for IT management to better leverage their assets including hardware, software and personnel.

Executive involvement doubled in past year
According to the 2009 disaster recovery survey, 70 percent of respondents reported that their disaster recovery committees involved the CIO, CTO or IT director -- a significant increase from last year's research where 33 percent of respondents indicated executive involvement. As budgets increased over the past year, disaster recovery initiatives have become more of a competitive differentiator, and impact of downtown on customers is greater than ever. Another reason for executive involvement is the increase of applications that are seen as mission critical. Sixty percent of applications were deemed mission critical by respondents, and nearly the same amount is covered in disaster recovery plans. Any sort of outage to these systems will have an enormous impact to the business.

Disaster recovery testing improves but still a major challenge
This year, 35 percent of respondents reported that they test their DR plans once per year or less frequently -- a 12 percent improvement from last year. In addition, one in four tests still fail, showing a dramatic need for improvement in this area.