Disaster recovery tops Australia's storage wishlist

One IT professional summed up what many have been mulling over recently: it sometimes takes losing data for a company to realise it needs a disaster recovery plan.

Speed of implementation, financial limitations, and the overall cost are also recurring themes. "From a business perspective do I have to do it?," one IT pro asked.

He also questioned the use of a remote data storage location if, referring to September 11, it's under tons of cement.

The issue was on the agenda of these people after vendor StorageTek released a survey at an industry briefing this morning. The survey found that more than 75 percent of respondents wanted a better disaster recovery capability.

Although disaster recovery topped respondent's wishlists, reduced backup windows and automated backup were also high up the list of priorities.

There were 80 people surveyed from 60 organisations, with StorageTek marketing manager Joan Tunstall believing that most of these were either storage managers, or staff involved in making technical recommendations for their companies.

Tunstall said companies needed to look at what was the impact of a particular application going down. "At the moment CIOs are asking their people what disaster recovery plans they have in place," she predicted.

She said disaster recovery planning didn't necessarily mean having to mirror everything in order to be effective. -People can use their existing infrastructure to build good disaster recovery plans," Tunstall said.

"Look at what can happen, scenarios, recovery times — people need to be pragmatic about what they're choosing," she said.