Datacentre recovery times are on the rise, as outage costs hit $1.6m

Rising datacentre recovery times are a concern to businesses which stand to lose big money with every hour of downtime.

In a survey of 500 CIOs across the US and Europe, 68 percent of respondents said they believe their backup and recovery tools will become less effective as the amount of data and servers in the organisation rises. 

The study also found that recovering virtual servers is faster than recovering physical servers, at five and six hours respectively. However, the amount of time it takes to recover both types of server has risen by an hour since 2011, when it only took four hours to recover a virtual server and five hours to recover a physical one.

This slight increase in downtime can have a significant impact on a business. The survey claims that every hour of datacentre downtime costs an enterprise $324,793 (£215,594), which means the average cost to an organisation for each incident is $1.6m (£1.06m).

The majority of CIOs (58 percent) said they are planning to change their backup tool for virtual environments by 2014, with 42 percent saying the main incentive for doing so was saving money, according to the research commissioned by Veeam Software.