Users Rethinking Disaster Recovery Plans

An impromptu survey of IT managers at the Storage Networking World conference has found that many are starting to rethink their disaster recovery plans due to lack of funding.

According to an article on the CIO.com website, the poll of 1,000 conference attendees found that many I.T. managers say disaster recovery is a top issue. Fifty-five percent of respondents said that executives at their companies have cost-justified, though not necessarily approved, business continuity and disaster recovery projects, and 25 percent find that tiered storage architecture projects meet the cost criteria imposed on them.

But according to one expert, Jon William Toigo, senior analyst at Toigo Partners International, disaster recovery is rarely a front-burner issue for I.T. organizations. It’s more often an insurance policy without a return on investment, which is why such projects can be so difficult to fund, he told CIO.com.

A conference panelist, Al Todd, senior vice president of the I.T. services division at Pacific Capital Bancorp, told attendees that his company has decided to stop outsourcing its backup tasks and “bring disaster recovery in-house.”

Todd told the attendees that the bank’s service provider currently uses a backup facility in Philadelphia, across the country from Pacific Capital’s primary data center in Santa Barbara, California. The new plan calls for using an in-house site that will be located about 240 miles away from the data center.

“Our main concern was, what if you have a disaster, and [several] banks come into that site at the same time? Who gets first dibs?” Todd asked. “I want it to be me.”