Each major outage of business-critical data can cost over a million pounds, it is estimated, with data replication failures playing a major part.
Market research firm Vanson Bourne surveyed 500 CIOs from organisations across the US, the UK, Germany and France that employ more than 1,000 people. The outage costs are based on an average server recovery time of four hours, when companies have not replicated their data to cope with such outages.
Server replication, unlike general backup, is a process of copying data to hardware that can be brought quickly online in the event of an outage. The survey found that enterprises using server replication only replicate around 26% of business critical servers.
Enterprises actually using server replication estimated that in the event of outages, their cost savings are over $417,000 per hour from their replicated server. However, the remaining 74% of their unreplicated server estate would actually cost them over $436,000 per hour in an outage, they said.
The top three barriers preventing increased server replication included cost of hardware (60% of respondents), cost of replication software (52%) and complexity (42%).
“At a time when virtualisation is helping drive greater efficiency in server costs, many would assume that some of these barriers to server replication would fall. But this is simply not the case,” said Ratmir Timashev, CEO of data security and management firm Veeam Software, which sponsored the survey.
