IT departments may unwittingly make disaster worse, by sticking to "old-school" data recovery techniques and performing near-useless drills, a business continuance expert has warned.
"Tolerance of downtime is not what it used to be," said David Rabinowitz of enterprise storage company EMC.
"Business units are beginning to be aware that they need some good techniques, but when they speak to the IT department, the department says 'yes we have a tried-and-true method'-they are conditioned to a multi-day recovery process."
Rabinowitz told PC Week that many companies had a false sense of security from drills and exercises that often pay little attention to serious data recovery issues.
"You may [evaluate your plans] by performing drills and exercises, but even after 24 hours notice these will still fail. Staff will spend hours messing with tape and declare a victory anyway," Rabinowitz said.
Rabinowitz said many companies were planning disaster recovery based on "old era business practises... but it doesn't take long to point and click and choose a new favourite in the era of the Internet".
"We can take it as given that businesses are inseparable from their information processing, particularly Web businesses. You must be certain you can recover your IT systems and do it quickly. There's no use in being weeks behind."
"Few companies today service end users from a single platform, so their recovery strategy needs to embrace all platforms and get the data at the same time. So at the recovery site it is not a jigsaw missing pieces. Recovering nine-tenths of business information is useless, you need ten-tenths."
EMC's data recovery products are used in five of Australia's top banks as well as in airlines, manufacturers and telcos around the world. The company claims its techniques can be definitively tested.
