More and more companies today are rethinking the decision to use "hot site" vendors for disaster recovery and are working toward the creation of internal data recovery facilities instead, analysts report.
Damian Walch, vice president of consulting at T-Systems and a speaker at TechTarget's 2003 Data Center Futures conference, says the main reason for this trend is that many companies feel outsiders simply can't be trusted to recover complex and increasingly interdependent systems quickly enough after an outage.
Walch said some other reasons companies are beginning to look inward for their recovery needs include the increasing price of hot site vendors' technical support and floor space, and the lack of control businesses have when it comes to accessing the vendors' facilities.
"Traditionally, companies went to a commercial hot site vendor like Comdisco or SunGard," Walch said. "But now they're realizing that, because of some of the dynamics in [the disaster recovery] industry, hot site vendors can no longer meet their requirements."
One of the things businesses should consider when deciding if in-house data recovery is a viable option is the number of applications that require complete recovery within six hours of an outage. Companies that have at least two applications they can't live without make good candidates for in-sourcing disaster recovery, Walch said.
Another consideration is the amount of excess floor space and server capacity a company has for the testing and development of new applications. "If you have test and development systems, what many companies do is relocate them to an alternate location and use them for recovery," Walch said.
One of the challenges associated with in-sourcing data recovery is making the business case to company executives. To help bring the case together, Walch said businesses should perform a cost benefit analysis of internal versus external data recovery.
"What I do is look at all the cost items and measure those things in an internal approach versus an external approach," Walch said. "Cost items include the price of hardware acquisition, or the subscription rates for various hardware, network costs, the staff itself, floor space and test time."
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