After about 79 percent Indian IT firms faced computer system failures and 67 percent faced virus attacks, companies are not just increasing their budgets for data recovery (DR), but also involving company top-notches in DR committees. These findings were released in the 2009 Symantec Disaster Recovery Research report on Wednesday.

“Disaster recovery is now a boardroom discussion in Indian enterprises. The extent of damage caused by downtime due to natural, manmade and system disasters and the business continuity issues arising from it have made Indian chief information officers to take a completely different view on mitigation strategies,” said Anand Naik, director, Systems Engineering, Symantec India.

According to the survey, “79 percent of Indian enterprises faced computer system failures in the last one year, 67 percent had virus attacks 51 percent had the fear of data loss that triggered better disaster recovery plans in Indian enterprises.” The research shows that Indian enterprises allot 30 percent of their annual IT budget for disaster recovery initiatives, including backup, recovery, clustering, archiving, spare servers, replication, tape, services, disaster recovery plan development and offsite costs at data centers. However, at least 53 percent of Indian respondents of the survey are willing to increase their spending over next 24 months.

The average cost of executing/implementing disaster recovery plans for each downtime incident worldwide according to respondents is $287,600. In India, the median cost can climb to as high as $105,000. This is alarming when one considers that one in four tests failed and 93 percent of enterprises have had to execute on their disaster recovery plans, stated a press release about the survey from Symantec.

... contd.