UK businesses are apprehensive to adopt cloud computing for disaster recovery due to security, cost and reliability of third-party services, according to a survey commissioned by Neverfail.
The survey, which included more than 1,000 UK IT managers and C-level executives from public and private sector organisations, found that 27.4% respondents were concerned about security, while 20.4% and 16.9% are concerned about cost and reliability, respectively.
It also revealed that 37.6% of respondents were unsure of cloud platforms as a viable option for disaster recovery (DR), while a further 31.3% would not consider a hosted cloud infrastructure as a method for protecting IT resources.
The survey highlighted that despite the possible long-term economic and efficiency advantages of cloud-based environments, IT decision makers remain reluctant to host DR environments in public clouds.
The survey found that the deployment of critical applications on virtual machines is strong, with 58.3 % of respondents having now migrated tier one applications to virtual platforms.
This demonstrates a maturity in the virtualization market, particularly as businesses and IT staff are better equipped and trained to migrate and maintain virtually hosted applications.
Expressing concerns of the cost related to downtime, 17.4% of businesses stated that the hourly cost of downtime amounts to more than £5,000, with 12.7% respondent suggesting that this loss would equate to more than £10,000 per hour.
Despite the potential enormity of this financial loss, 47.5% of all surveyed were unaware of the hourly costs of downtime to their business.
The survey clearly outlines that business disruption and cost of IT failure need to be a priority for IT decision makers, ensuring all end-to-end processes are supported to guarantee companies are not hit with large financial blows following an IT outage.
During periods of downtime, 42.4% of respondents are contacted incessantly by internal workers until the IT problems are resolved, while 58.8% of businesses rely on C-level executives to define the criteria of critical applications, according to the survey.
It stated that 42.7% of respondents indicated a need for 24-7 accessibility to critical applications. Power cuts or data centre problems causes 38.8% of outages, according to the survey.
Neverfail VP of Marketing Bob Roudebush said without access to business resources, severe financial implications and reputational damage are very real consequences, as well as long, drawn out processes in getting users back online.
"An interesting observation from this survey is the high numbers of businesses running tier one applications on virtual machines, supporting an industry trend that suggests end-users are using virtualization as a stepping stone to adopting cloud services," he added.
"By re-thinking availability strategies as infrastructure changes are instigated, IT decision makers can ensure that a good level of resiliency is in place to avoid any downtime, allowing businesses to focus attention on delivering excellent standards of service to their own customers."
