Organisations have more information to protect, but less manpower and resources with which to do it.

More than 50% of New Zealand businesses claim a lack of storage space is the main challenge when backing up critical data, Symantec says.

The global anti-virus software provider released the international results of its fifth annual disaster recovery (DR) survey last month, which highlighted that 39% of New Zealand businesses lacked adequate storage, while 49% lacked adequate recovery tools.

The survey showed that while DR budgets were higher in 2009 than 2008, they were set to flatten over the next few years. But due to the rising cost of DR and the restructuring of businesses, this means IT professionals are going to have to do more with less.

The survey also showed that while recovery objectives were reduced to around four hours, and three hours for skeleton operations, DR testing and virtualisation remained key challenges for the majority of organisations.

Fewer than 60% of organisations claimed that virtualisation was causing businesses to re-evaluate DR plans. This is up from 55% globally and 35% in Australia and New Zealand since the last survey.

Respondents cited a lack of backup storage capacity, a lack of automated recovery tools, and resource constraints as their main challenges, together with a lack of storage management tools in delivering robust DR plans.

Almost 30% of all businesses fail to test virtual environments as part of their DR plans. Symantec said this was alarming, as 25% of tests fail and 93% of organisations have to put their DR plans into action at some stage. The survey revealed that downtime costs were soaring and that more stringent IT service level requirements were forcing businesses to re-evaluate their plans.

In Australia and New Zealand 39% of respondents reported that they tested their DR plans once a year or less. This was blamed on lack of resources, the disruption it causes to employees and customers, and budget restrictions.

The survey showed that the annual medium budget for DR for large organisations including backup, recovery, clustering, archiving, spare servers, replication, tape, services, disaster recovery plan development and offsite costs at data centers, was around $US79 million. This is set to grow by 55% in Australia and New Zealand during the year.

The cost of executing or implementing disaster recovery plans for each downtime incident was around $900,000. Symantec said globally this number is the highest for healthcare and financial services organisations.

The global survey was commissioned by Symantec to highlight business trends regarding DR planning. The survey polled more than 1650 IT managers in large organisations across 24 countries in the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and South America.