SteelEye Technology, Inc., provider of award-winning data protection and high availability solutions for Linux and Windows, today released a preview of results from its annual SteelEye Technology Business Continuity Index, a survey examining adoption levels, best practices and attitudes regarding business continuity among IT professionals and C-level executives. Top-level findings revealed today showed rising year-to-year adoption of technologies that leverage redundant and geographically separated disaster recovery sites, such as automated data replication and application recovery solutions.
In particular, this year, 79% of respondent organizations with a BC plan reported they have implemented an automated data replication solution between their primary production site and their disaster recovery site. Last year, when the same question was posed to respondents, only 63% said they had one in place. This represents over a 25% rise in adoption.
Similarly, organizations are deploying automated application recovery solutions in greater numbers than in previous years. 66% of respondents to this year’s survey said they have implemented an automated application recovery solution between their production and disaster recovery sites. This is also significant increase over last year, when 54% said they had not yet used a failover cluster solution for this purpose.
“Organizations aren’t just focusing on storage - they’re realizing that assuring business continuity is about much more than keeping a backup of customer data - you need to keep applications up and running,” noted Bob Williamson, Senior Vice President for SteelEye Technology. “The ability to quickly restore the key business applications that access the data may be even more important. They’ve moved relatively quickly to implement geographic redundancy and are now deploying protections for both data and applications in order to assure true business continuity.”
Both trends fall in line with additional survey results that suggest that organizations are addressing BC more often by implementing automated solutions than by adding headcount. 79% of respondents said they are focusing on adding technology more than IT personnel resource in their efforts to maintain high availability.
“The secret has certainly been out for a long time that automation frees up IT resources and improves efficiency, but these results confirm that IT leaders are also increasingly applying that approach to business continuity,” noted Williamson. “Cost concerns begin to fall away when they see the efficiency gains from affordable failover technologies, and simply disappear as IT leaders come to understand the true business cost of application downtime.”
SteelEye’s flagship product, LifeKeeper, provides LAN and WAN-based, end-to-end protection of critical resources and enables companies of all sizes to ensure continuous availability of business-critical applications, servers and data. LifeKeeper Data Replication is an industry-proven solution on Windows and Linux that provides dynamic, disk-level replication of data across local and wide area networks. Viewed by industry experts as best in class, LifeKeeper most recently garnered LinuxWorld’s 2007 Product Excellence Award for Best Clustering Solution for its Protection Suite for VMWare Infrastructure 3.