Virtualisation 'leads to disaster recovery re-evaluation'

Over two-thirds of respondents to a Symantec survey said the onset of virtual private servers and cloud computing has led them to re-evaluate their disaster recovery plans.

This represents an increase from the 55 per cent of IT managers who noted that virtualisation had such an impact in 2008.

Despite the popularity of virtualisation, 36 per cent of data on a virtual system is not regularly backed up, the survey noted.

Furthermore, 27 per cent of organisations do not test their virtual environments as part of their disaster recovery plans.

Resource limitations such as budgets, space and people are challenges to a successful migration to virtual private servers, the poll discovered, although outsourcing such IT responsibilities to a reliable web hosting firm could help.

"If organisations are not protecting virtual environments, not testing their disaster recovery plans and seeing one out every four tests fail then something needs to change to better manage risk to the business," commented Rob Soderbery, senior vice-president of Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group.

Hiring a reliable web hosting firm to manage virtual private servers could be important, after research by OpTier found that 75 per cent of businesses are confused by the complexity of their IT systems.

Written by Tim Dunton