Companies should virtualise disaster recovery

More and more firms are turning to co-location and managed hosting as the economic downturn bites, but most businesses are failing to take full advantage of its benefits, it has been claimed.

According to IT expert Justin Giardina, the use of virtualisation can extend to a firm's disaster recovery plan, not just data storage and web hosting.

Writing for the Web Host Industry Review, he claimed that "containing and consolidating" their server environment should not stop at migrating applications and operating systems to virtual machines.

"Let's face it - virtualisation coupled with some of the newer replication technologies can yield extremely cost effective disaster recovery options that once were only available to large enterprise companies," Mr Giardina said.

He concluded: "For those of you implementing virtualisation within your organisation, make sure you look into the myriad of disaster recovery options and benefits."

Recent research by AT&T showed that a third of companies with a turnover of £15 million or more have had to implement their disaster recovery plans.

Written by Debra Hastings-Henry