Why IT resilience is a top priority for APJ organisations in 2017

In the last year, the number of organisations across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) that experienced an outage rose significantly. Indeed, our recent research with Ovum reported that a third (34%) of organisations experienced an IT outage, disaster or major disruption. And it’s no wonder that we’re seeing more organisations placing greater emphasis on disaster recovery plans and IT resilience.

Expectations from customers have risen and additional regulatory requirements have been tightened, compelling enterprises to include disaster recovery as one of their top strategic data centre priorities. Disaster recovery (DR) software is now a top concern for many enterprises, with more than 45% of APJ enterprises mentioning it as a top data centre investment priority, ranking it third behind cloud architecture and infrastructure and security. China led the pack on this followed by Australia, India, Taiwan and Japan.

What really stood out from the research findings was the importance of acting quickly after an outage. More than a third (33%) of organisations experienced a loss of one to five hours of data, making it the largest group of enterprises.

No company is immune to a potential outage or disaster and in the event this does strike, the first few minutes are critical to recovering as quickly as possible and organisations need the ability to revert back to minutes before an outage, ensuring they have up-to-date resources and files. This is how disaster recovery plans really need to evolve to an IT resilience strategy to avoid not only down-time but the risk of brand damage and potential customer loss. IT resilience ensures that from a customer or end-user perspective, there is no interruption to service.

Ovum believes that the disaster recovery market will move to a new growth phase and a new generation of software-defined and cloud-ready solutions. This move is seeing business and IT leaders making disaster recovery an essential element of infrastructure strategy discussions.

For both enterprises looking to implement a DR strategy and cloud service providers, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) can provide a win/win scenario. For cloud providers, DRaaS provides a critical first step to lead enterprises to the cloud. It empowers them to ‘test the water’ without giving up control over production applications in their data centres. For enterprises, it allows them to act quickly and provides a huge cost and resource saving, in comparison to putting together a replication site and other necessary systems. In addition, it replaces upfront investments with ongoing monthly bills and ensures higher performance and reliability by the cloud provider.

Nineteen per cent of enterprises in Asia Pacific have already deployed a cloud solution when outsourcing their disaster recovery. A further 17% will implement DRaaS over the next 12 months and 29% are considering DRaaS with no firm plans. Our experience in the field indicates two things; DR is becoming mainstream in a way that backup was the norm; also as the promise of cloud materialises, it is clearly becoming an enabler for many more companies to implement DR solutions that could not have afforded to do so before.