8 CHANNELV ISION | JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2023 Events of the past few years have made the need for disaster recovery planning crystal clear. A worldwide pandemic, subsequent lockdowns, power outages, wars and cyberattacks have exposed organizations that were not fully prepared to respond to disruptions. But many IT organizations do not have the resources or the capability to handle disaster recovery all in-house? “A successful in-house disaster recovery plan is severely dependent upon the expertise of organizations’ dedicated IT teams and costly hardware infrastructure,” said analysts at Los Angeles-based Avasant Research. “Because of that reality, many organizations find value in disaster recovery outsourcing, where a service provider is responsible for off-site data storage, recovery data centers or redundant systems.” After remaining relatively flat during the past few years, outsourcing of disaster recovery functions significantly increased in 2021, according to a recent report on the topic by Avasant Research. The percentage of organizations outsourcing this function has spiked to 46 percent in 2021, up from 36 percent in 2020 and 34 percent in 2019. “It appears that the pandemic has shown us that not all disaster recovery scenarios involve major natural events or malicious attacks,” said Avasant researchers. With the implementation of hybrid and remote worker models, as well as cloud computing, “several organizations have opted to reduce internal workloads to an external service provider with the significant experience, specialized skills and appropriate facilities to reduce disruption risks.” Indeed, the uptick in outsourced disaster recovery is not hard to understand. As the Avasant report pointed out, the amount of business transacted online continues to expand, even for traditional brick-and-mortar organizations, making the cost of downtime more expensive. Factories and distribution centers, meanwhile, are increasingly automated, and operations can grind to a halt if a disaster strikes. A network outage also can be disastrous for healthcare providers that increasingly rely on digital images and electronic medical records for patient care. Moreover, in some industries, such as banking, disaster recovery capabilities are mandated by law. All the while, it’s become readily apparent that not all disaster recovery scenarios involve so-called “disasters” such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes or terrorist attacks. Rather, disruptions are more likely to involve public-grid power outages, network outages, transit failures, simple human errors, or system failures, suggested the Avasant study, “It is important that IT managers not lose sight of the more mundane incidents that can disrupt business operations,” warned the report. So while the outsourcing of DR functions has significantly increased, more surprising to Avasant researchers is the high percentage of organizations that have yet to adopt this strategy. “Some CIOs may have decided that disaster recovery is too important to outsource despite the high service and cost success,” said the report. “Others have invested in cloud in hopes that many of their disaster recovery responsibilities have shifted to their provider.” o Organizations increasingly looking for outside help with disaster recovery AVOIDING DISASTER By Martin Vilaboy Outsourcing Frequency: Disaster Recovery Services Source: Avasant Research Power shoppers are adopting marketplaces at an a Source: Mirakl 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% % of shopping done on marketplaces Power sh ppers: consumers that shop online once a week or more Average Consumer Power S opp r France Australia UK Spain U.S. 34% 34% 34% 36% 46% AT YOUR SERVICE: XaaS
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