While practiced by less than one-third of IT organizations, disaster recovery outsourcing is gaining ground as companies shift IT resources and functions to cloud service providers and respond to demands for improved business continuity planning.
As our study Disaster Recovery Outsourcing Trends and Experience shows, only 31% of organizations outsourcing any portion of the disaster recovery function to service providers in 2010. This includes companies that only partially outsourced disaster recovery. However, that figure is up from 27% in the prior year (Figure 1).
While disaster recovery outsourcing has not returned to pre-recession levels, our study finds other indications that disaster recovery service providers are penetrating deeper into existing accounts, capturing more of their clients business. Moreover, the decline in disaster recovery outsourcing from 2007 and 2009 is in line with the trend in other outsourcing categories.
The full study examines the trend toward outsourcing disaster recovery and the cost and service experience of organizations that engage in the practice. It reports the percentage of organizations outsourcing disaster recovery capabilities (frequency), the average amount of work outsourced (level), and the change in the amount of work being outsourced (trend).
We also present data on the cost and service experiences of IT organizations that outsource disaster recovery, show how these experiences differ by organization size and sector, and examine the minimal role that offshore outsourcing plays in this market.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, Disaster Recovery Outsourcing Trends and Experience. The full report is available at no charge for Computer Economics clients, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing).