Why Schools Fail at IT Disaster Recovery Efforts
Disaster Recovery Preparedness
51% of respondents said they are only somewhat prepared to recover their IT and related assets in the event of a disaster or other incident. 46% said they are very prepared, 4% say they are not prepared.
Compliance Drives Disaster Recovery
54% of respondents who have compliance as a requirement said they are very prepared to recover from a disaster, compared to 32% without compliance requirements.
DRaaS Aids Recovery
63% of organizations with Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) feel very prepared to recover in case of a disaster, compared to 56% with disaster recovery in a hosted or MSP environment.
Compliance and DRaaS
Respondents who adhere to compliance and use DRaaS are better prepared than those that do not. 66% of the former feel very prepared, compared to 61% of the latter. 34% of the first group feel somewhat prepared, compared to 32% in the second group.
Educational Institutions Far Less Confident
26% of respondents from educational institutions said they are very prepared to handle a major IT disaster, the largest proportion of respondents compared to for-profit, not-for-profit and government.
Organization Size and Compliance
Larger organizations are more likely to have compliance requirements for disaster recovery. The percent that have compliance are: 1 to 10 employees: 32%, 11 to 99 employees: 55.5%, 100 to 2,000 employees: 64%, 2,001 to 5,000 employees: 67%, More than 5,000 employees: 84.5%
Worrisome Legacy Methods
45% of respondents use backup tapes as their disaster recovery solution. 42% use additional servers and devices at their primary disaster recovery site. “These legacy methods are worrisome when more advanced and reliable options are available,” the report states.
Other Disaster Recovery Methods
Even though most respondents use backup tapes with other methods, 51% have added more equipment at the primary site. This is useless in the case of a flood or another disaster. Alternatively, 34% of respondents use software-based replication and 36% have equipment at a secondary site.
Leading Causes of Outages
Hardware failure/server room concerns are the leading cause of incidents and outages (47%). The second leading cause is environmental disasters, such as floods, fires and ice storms (35%). The remaining percentage is miscellaneous outages (28%).
Hours of Data Lost
More than one-half of respondents experienced an incident during which they lost data, with 12% losing more than one day’s worth.
Educational Organizations’ Losses
Regarding data loss, educational institutions fare worse than other types of organizations. 31.5% lost more than one day’s worth of data during their worst incident. As for permanent losses 15.5% lost critical data and 15.5% of backups were not recoverable.
Disaster Recovery Budgets
58% of respondents of educational institutions say their disaster recovery budget is underfunded, compared to for-profit companies (37%), not-for-profit organizations (44%) and government agencies (50%).
