IT disaster recovery outsourcing: A planning guide for enterprise CIOs

But drafting an in-house IT disaster recovery plan is often not enough. Many enterprises are now outsourcing their IT disaster recovery functions, both to further protect their data centers from total failure and, in some cases, to save money and increase efficiencies.

This CIO Briefing examines the importance of IT disaster recovery outsourcing planning, makes the case for DR funding, examines the effects of the recession on DR outsourcing and lays out the technologies available for DR outsourcing strategy.

Table of contents

• The importance of IT DR outsourcing planning
• Making the case for IT disaster recovery outsourcing funding
• The effect of the recession on IT disaster recovery budgets
• IT disaster recovery outsourcing technologies
• IT disaster recovery outsourcing in action
• More resources

The importance of IT DR outsourcing planning

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Most organizations are operationally pressurized, and everything is about the operational imperative. It is the DR service provider's main job to look after DR and the tests that go with it. So, for those who don't have the time or the resources to dedicate to DR, having someone else take that on can really be helpful.

Also, your costs can be significantly less than trying to provide that level of disaster preparedness in-house.

Learn more in "Disaster recovery services FAQ."

Making the case for IT DR outsourcing funding

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In a tight economy, how do you make the case for your company to invest in disaster recovery? SearchCIO.com talked with leading providers of disaster recovery services and asked how they are advising clients who need to prove the value of their DR programs. Here are some of their dos and don'ts.

1. Sell a disaster recovery program by doing a risk assessment or a business impact analysis.

Such an analysis will focus the plan on the features that are most critical, thus saving money. "You can't focus on everything, given the economic constraints," said Bill Hughes, director of consulting services at SunGard Availability Services LP. Do you really need to have a clustered environment in your recovery environment? Or 10 Web servers? A risk assessment will help CIOs focus on what they absolutely need to mitigate the core risk and, if necessary, defer the rest. Hurricanes sound scary, Hughes said, but if you have certain preventive risk controls, what is the chance of a hurricane affecting you? Business resiliency is a preventive risk control.

"Maybe your biggest vulnerability is change control and the software release process. Focus more on those pains more often," Hughes said.

Find out more in "Seven tips to make the value case for disaster recovery." Also:

• Seven steps to securing funding of your disaster recovery plan
  Selling a disaster recovery plan to the CEO isn't easy. Follow these seven steps to secure funding for your company's disaster recovery plan.

The effect of the recession on IT DR budgets

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IT disaster recovery spending is never an easy sell, but a troubled economy has made the pitch even harder, forcing many companies to look for ways to trim DR services without adding undue risk, according to leading providers of DR services.

Eighteen months ago, CIOs and IT disaster recovery managers might have focused on often-expensive technologies to fill a gap in DR coverage. Now, they are more likely to focus on people and processes. Some are looking to wring more from existing assets by using distant corporate buildings for secondary or tertiary recovery sites. CIOs are also exploiting server virtualization to reduce floor space at their leased recovery sites, and they are boosting the resiliency of their internal IT infrastructures to minimize the impact of a disaster, these providers said.

"The economy has been a challenge for clients, no question," said Patrick Corcoran, global client solutions executive at IBM and a 32-year veteran in the disaster recovery/business continuity field. "Before it became an issue, there were a lot of discussions about lowering RTOs and RPOs, especially RPOs. Clients didn't want to lose data."

Now, these same IT departments are taking a second look at data tiers -- and recalibrating, in some cases -- to save money on disaster recovery services, said Corcoran and others.

Learn more in "Recession squeezing IT disaster recovery budgets." Also:

• Disaster recovery plans affected by economic downturn
  Companies grappling with budget cuts turn to cloud services and other methods to complete disaster recovery projects.

IT DR outsourcing technologies

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Many enterprises have been insourcing IT disaster recovery in recent years through a combination of disk-based backup, server virtualization and, increasingly, cloud server capacity. DR providers are now doing many of the same things, changing the nature of what CIOs can and should expect from outsourcing DR.

One clear example is the shift from tape to disk backup. DR providers have long made a living picking up and storing tapes. Now, almost all the vendors interviewed for SearchCIO.com's DR trends story said they were advising clients to move from tape to electronic vaulting for backup, both to save money and improve recovery service levels.

While tape certainly is less expensive than a replication infrastructure, providers said CIOs need to factor in the "people and risk" costs associated with tape in a recovery scenario, including the time spent managing tapes, the risk of lost tapes and the possibility that they may be unable to recover tapes.

Consultant Jon Toigo, a DR expert and CEO of Toigo Partners International, argues that many of the problems with tape backup can be fixed by batching jobs according to volume of data and connecting interface speed to the network. "Set up the job as a string of sequential jobs," he said, by investing in a storage resource management tool.

Learn more in "Technology is changing IT disaster recovery outsourcing." Also:

• New offerings that may cut the cost of your IT disaster recovery plan
  Server virtualization, plus software-based replication and cloud computing offerings, can reduce the cost of your IT disaster recovery plan.
• Business continuity and disaster recovery outsourcing tutorial
  Outsourcing disaster recovery and business continuity services can save you money and increase productivity. Learn about vendors in the DR/BC space and how to choose one.

IT disaster recovery outsourcing in action

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A new cloud disaster recovery startup that uses a combination of Data Domain Inc. data deduplication appliances and VMware Inc. virtual servers to offer application and data recovery services has already turned a few heads in the cloud storage market.

Simply Continuous, based in San Francisco, came out of stealth last November and officially launched its services this summer.

It has two offerings: Data Recovery Vault and AppAlive. Both involve the use of Data Domain's DD series appliances at the customer site, which replicate to Data Domain appliances at the Simply Continuous data center. AppAlive adds bare-metal restore of servers from virtual hot standbys stored by Simply Continuous, which can also perform the conversion of physical servers to virtual servers using VMware's vCenter Converter tool.

Learn more in "Users go for Simply Continuous cloud disaster recovery service." Also:

• Disaster recovery strategy shift reduces data loss, recovery time
  Under pressure to improve RTO and minimize mainframe data loss, IT veterans at MetLife devised a strategy that put tape out to pasture.
• Disaster recovery plans solve bare-metal recovery problem via VMware
  Learn how a midmarket insurance company uses virtualization and replication to enable recovery of its Windows server farm in a reasonable time frame. A mainframe benefits, too.
• Firm moves from tape backup to managed backup and recovery service
  The move from tape to disk-based replication continues, as does the demand for online backup and DR services. Just ask the CIO of a $200 million nonprofit in hurricane-prone Houston.
• When IT disaster recovery plan is put to the test, VoIP becomes savior
  As floods test a utility's IT disaster recovery plan, a VoIP installation rescues business continuity efforts and shows the importance of DR planning for non-headquarters offices.

More resources

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• Enterprise disaster recovery planning (SearchCIO.com resource center)
• Enterprise business continuity management (SearchCIO.com resource center)