Business continuity: Can you afford to risk it?

But, despite more than a decade of IT managers being told to plan to protect their IT resources by a growing number of vendors and systems integrators in the business continuity space, many companies remain unprepared for when disaster strikes.

But even for those organisations that have planned ahead in case the worst happens to their IT systems, all is not well. In many companies, for example, wide area network (WAN) throughput is the limiting factor.

In a survey carried out amongst 170 IT managers in enterprise environments earlier this year, on behalf of NetEx, the Storage Technology Corporation spin-off, researchers discovered that business continuity and disaster recovery initiatives are being hindered by WAN throughput.

Throwing more bandwidth at the problem, researchers found, did not solve the problem.

The 45-day survey asked IT managers about their problems with WAN-based business continuity and disaster recovery solutions.

Soliciting the opinions of end users with a cross-section of network attached storage (NAS), array, server, appliance and intelligent switch-based approaches, the survey focused on topics relating to throughput, transport mechanisms and implementation payback periods.

65 per cent of respondents said that business continuity and disaster recovery WAN throughput requirements are not always being met, whilst 62 per cent said that enhancing the available bandwidth did not fix the throughput issues they were experiencing.