While we anticipate the advent of cloud-based infrastructure services will improve the economics of disaster recovery outsourcing, our data is not as yet providing any strong evidence there is a corresponding growth in disaster recovery outsourcing.
Figure 2 from our study, Disaster Recovery Outsourcing Trends and Customer Experience, shows the percentage of organizations outsourcing this function in whole or in part held steady at 42% over the past two years. It appears to be on a gradual upward course since the start of the recovery period in 2011, where it rested at 38%, and, while not shown, up substantially from a recessionary low of 34% in 2009.
While the recovery in IT spending is prompting a gradual increase in disaster recovery outsourcing, we are not yet seeing any noticeable impact from the recent interest in disaster-recovery-as-a-service offerings.
We believe cloud-based disaster recovery offers the potential for greater flexibility, reduced costs, and simpler, more frequent and less expensive testing. Over time, it should increase the number of organizations that outsource disaster recovery as well.
Disaster recovery refers to the policies and procedures used by organizations to prepare for recovery or continuation of vital IT services in the aftermath of a disaster. Disaster recovery outsourcing may involve working with a service provider on risk assessment, assessing and classifying the relative criticality of applications and data, hardware inventory, and alternate network routing or diagnostics. Disaster recovery services can be as simple as restoring systems from backup tapes and as sophisticated as providing totally redundant data center, software, and network capabilities.
To help IT executives understand their options, the full study reports the percentage of organizations outsourcing disaster recovery capabilities (frequency), the scope 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.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, Disaster Recovery Outsourcing Trends and Customer 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).