KUALA LUMPUR, 9 FEBRUARY 2010 -- Disaster recovery capability is becoming even slower, according to security storage firm Symantec Malaysia.
"The management of more and more data applications is the top challenge for Malaysia-based companies," said Symantec regional technical director, systems engineering and customer advisory services, South Asia, Raymond Goh, speaking on the release of the annual Symantec 2010 State of the Data Centre Report.
"One third of disaster recovery plans are undocumented or need work and important IT components, such as cloud computing, remote office and virtual servers not included for Malaysian companies," Goh said. "Companies also need to employ non-intrusive DR test methods."
"Companies are focusing on wholesale backup procedures rather than archiving only critical data using a granular approach," said Goh.
"The top challenge for Malaysian companies is to improve service-level agreements (SLAs), which are becoming more difficult and costly to meet as they continue to become more refined and defined, supported only by limited staff resources," he said. "The third top challenge revealed in the study is that staffing and budgets remain tight at the data centre."
Goh said top objectives for Malaysian companies revealed in the study are improving service levels (86 per cent), increasing availability (84 per cent), improving responsiveness (84 per cent), reducing costs (78 per cent) and scaling/adding capacity (76 per cent).
He added that the latest study showed that the top five most important initiatives for Malaysian companies remain unchanged for 2010. "Top is security (92 per cent), followed by backup and recovery (86 per cent), continuous data protection (86 per cent), storage resource management (74 per cent), and data archiving (72 per cent)."
The Symantec 2010 State of the Data Centre Study is a yearly report that highlights trends regarding data centres in companies worldwide, and conducted by research firm Applied Research. The 2010 survey is based on input from 1,780 data centre managers in 26 countries in November 2009, with 560 of the respondents from the following Asia Pacific countries: Malaysia, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Deduplication solution, unified archiving
Symantec technical product manger, data protection group, Asia Pacific and Japan, Andre Xavier, said the new Symantec Backup Exec 2010 solution is to especially help Malaysian mid-sized companies (100-999 employees) meet the objectives highlighted in the study. "Backup Exec occupies a place between Backup Exec System Recovery, which is for small business, and NetBackup for organisations with more than 500 employees."
"Saving costs to back up less data is one of the benefits of Backup Exec," said Xavier. "Operational simplicity, adaptability are two other benefits."
"Unified archiving helps to automate savings, reduce backup management resources, as well as optimise exchange and file service performance," he said. "Customers can save money as only critical data is archived, allowing reduced expenditure on computing resources and storage."
"Malaysian companies need to improve disaster recovery testing by evaluating and implementing testing methods that are non-disruptive, as well as use a single, unified platform for physical and virtual machine protection to simplify information management," said Goh.
