Many IT and business executives groan when the topic of disaster recovery (DR) appears on the agenda. While most regard DR as important, it nevertheless often ends up in the same category as taking out insurance cover: you know you need it, really, but you're trying to keep expenditure to a minimum. And of course the real value of any insurance product only becomes apparent when disaster strikes, which is why DR initiatives often lose out to other projects, both in terms of funding and management attention.

But disaster does strike, and the minimalist' approach is getting increasingly risky, as businesses are more reliant than ever on the immediate and continued availability of their systems and data. Or put differently: the time span a business can function effectively without access to its most critical applications and data is getting shorter and shorter. This in turn means that the ability to recover quickly from a major incident is more pressing than ever.

So what can companies do to ensure that they're adequately prepared for when disaster strikes? More importantly, what can they do to make sure that the topic of DR isn't relegated to 'Other' on the management agenda?

A few answers can be found in the results of a survey Freeform Dynamics carried out with small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). We asked about levels of preparedness, as well as the DR technologies that were used. As was to be expected, we found that some companies were better prepared than others. But we also found a number of factors that the ones who are better prepared have in common. And while the respondent base for this study was SMBs, the lessons that can be learnt are equally applicable to all sizes of organisation.

Seven enablers of effective IT DR

There is no single most important differentiator between those who have better DR capabilities and those who are struggling. But we were able to identify a number of factors that all have a role to play when it comes to putting in place effective measures (Figure 1). This is not to say that these are the only factors - that's why we're not referring to them as 'the seven enablers'.  

Figure 1

If you'd like to find out more about each of the individual factors, and also take a look at the actual survey results, a copy of the complete report is available for free download here.

There's one final consideration to highlight which will make it easier to put appropriate DR mechanisms in place: 'baking' DR into all planning and review processes, right from the beginning. If DR is only addressed at the last possible moment before a project goes live, or is considered in isolation, it's likely to hit roadblocks in terms of management attention and consequently funding. If, on the other hand, DR requirements are taken into consideration right at the beginning - whether it's in the design of a new process or IT system, or software and/or hardware selection - it is more likely that a solution actually gets defined and implemented.

More than that, there is a virtuous circle here as well: many of the technologies that support more effective DR are the very same technologies that companies are considering anyway as part of modernising their IT infrastructure. If DR is a key consideration in the early planning stages, it is likely that the resulting solution is more cost-effective than anything that's retrofitted as part of a separate DR project that gets started - almost as an afterthought - in the later stages of planning.

Martha Bennett, VP, Head of Strategy at Freeform Dynamics Ltd.

Unlike cloud, however, which started out as largely a re-hashing of familiar ideas around hosting, SOA, data centre automation and business service management, the whole big data movement is introducing net new capability to the business mainstream from the outset, which was confirmed in a recent Freeform Dynamics research study (122 IT pro respondents, November 2011, Figure 1).

That's not to say that everything talked about in terms of big data technology is new in absolute terms, but until recently, there weren't that many offerings in some key big data areas that you would call genuinely 'enterprise ready'. This has been especially true in the areas of distributed indexing and search, and large scale distributed analytics, where it has often been a case of hand-crafting solutions based on a combination of open source and commercial components to get the desired result; fine if you are Yahoo!, Facebook or a big bank with lots of resource to throw at it, but not really tenable in a busy and resource-constrained mainstream IT department.

With this in mind, vendors like IBM and EMC have been playing the game of bringing open solutions together with their own proprietary technology for a while to form coherent offerings, or at least out of the box integration between the pieces required. This has been necessary because of the shortcomings of environments such as Apache Hadoop in the areas of resilience, security, management and development tooling.

Figure 1

In an announcement this week, however, the daddy of the high end database world, Oracle, has declared its hand. Having already been dabbling in the area of distributed indexing and search (with the Oracle NoSQL Database), it is now getting into bed with Cloudera, arguably the most established independent specialist provider in the Hadoop world.

The end result is the Oracle Big Data Appliance, a Hadoop stack underpinned by Sun/Linux servers and other platform components from Oracle, and augmented with Cloudera's enhanced Hadoop management environment. Oracle has also announced a portfolio of what it calls 'Big Data Connectors', which provide ease of integration between the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or Oracle NoSQL Database, and a traditional relational database environment.

These announcements are especially interesting given Oracle's existing strong presence in the high end data management and analytics space. The Cloudera guys are extremely capable and have been doing some good stuff, but the Hadoop distribution at the centre of their activities is strengthened by the Oracle platform pieces. Furthermore, rightly or wrongly, enterprise IT departments often prefer to work with an established incumbent when introducing new ideas and capability into the mix.

Oracle's broader database management pedigree is also important when we consider that big data technology will, on the whole, complement rather than replace traditional database and storage capability. Indeed there are many scenarios in which it makes sense to exploit both together, e.g. with preliminary exploration and analysis on large data sets with a poor signal to noise ratio taking place in Hadoop, then a more compact and structured derived data set being extracted into a traditional warehouse or BI environment. This is one of the reasons why the connectors Oracle is providing make absolute sense.

The co-existence of big data with traditional database and storage technologies was confirmed during the aforementioned research, which shows quite clearly that with the exception of legacy systems, IT professionals anticipate growth across all of the technology categories explored (Figure 2).

Figure 2

And if you ask the question explicitly, most people confirm that they don't anticipate big data solutions replacing traditional options in any significant way (Figure 3).

Figure 3

However, turning to hard practicality, we also see a couple of calls to action for vendors on this chart. IT professionals are not convinced that suppliers can back up all of the big data hype with tangible support and services at the moment to help customers realise the potential, and they also have concerns about licensing and commercial arrangements as data related needs become more demanding.

So, despite the technology advances, there is still some work to be done, and it will be interesting to see how Oracle deals with these issues as its big data activities continue to develop.

Dale Vile is CEO at Freeform Dynamics Ltd.

A couple of months ago, I picked up a tweet on Twitter that said something along the lines of: "It's interesting that all of the tech companies that have made a real difference are the ones that have emerged since the internet came along"

When I finished spewing coffee all over my monitor, I had a think about why my instincts were telling me this was a bit silly. I then went back to the person concerned and asked them to think about what would happen if some evil wizard came along and with a wave of his wand made everything enabled or delivered by one of the older companies disappear instantly.

IBM: A history in pictures

The obvious example was IBM. Wave that wand in Big Blue's direction and immediately our entire financial services infrastructure, telecom infrastructure and a lot of our utilities would collapse. Most large organisations and many public services would also be severely crippled.

Now try the same trick with FaceBook - yes people would miss it, but the world would go on, and some might even argue that it would be a better place. Same with Twitter and a lot of the other internet based companies. I have to admit that I hesitated over Google, but when it really gets down to it, while it would hurt to lose internet search, and the immediate access to the  information it represents, I am not sure it would bring the planet crashing to a halt in the same way.

And anyway, when you consider that it was the R&D investment of entities like IBM over the previous decades that enabled a lot of what internet companies, and the rest of us for that matter, now take for granted, it puts things into perspective. 

From early calculating machines, though DRAM, RISC processors, magnetic disk drives, the relational database, and the PC, right up to the Watson supercomputer that recently won America's Jeopardy! game show against the best human contestants, IBM has consistently been, and continues to be, one of the most prolific sources of world-changing innovation on the planet.

So we at Freeform Dynamics would like to say happy birthday IBM, as it turns a century old today. Here's to the next 100 years of innovation.

Dale Vile, CEO, Freeform Dynamics Ltd