A Custom Technology Adoption Profile Commissioned By EMC Corporation

How Organizations Are Improving Business Resiliency With Continuous IT Availability

February 2013

Introduction: Business Stakeholders Demand Higher Levels Of IT Availability

In today’s economic environment, organizations must deliver top-notch service 24x7 or suffer financial losses and long-

term damage to the organization’s reputation. In the private sector, if your service is down, your customers can move to a

competitor with relative ease; in the public sector, loss of access to critical services can erode citizen confidence in

government institutions; and in healthcare, it can endanger patient health. Across all industries, there is less and less

tolerance for any kind of downtime. And in a hyper-connected world, news of downtime spreads rapidly, making it ever

more difficult to repair damaged reputations. As a result, key stakeholders in the organization are demanding much higher

levels of IT service availability. In just the past few years, discussions of acceptable downtime and data loss have shifted

from hours and minutes to seconds, and for many organizations, the discussion has shifted to continuous availability.

There is another shift taking place; your stakeholders no longer care what caused the downtime or even if the downtime

was planned. They no longer make a distinction between incidents that disrupt a portion of IT services such as localized

software failures, hardware failures, and data corruption or incidents that affect the entire data center such as extreme

weather and regional power outages. From their perspective (and your clients’ perspective), service is down.

This Technology Adoption Profile examines how IT decision-makers’ expectations and approaches are evolving to address

these increasing demands from their organization and clients.

The Risks To Availability Are Increasing As business demands for availability are increasing, so too are the risks. Every week there is news of another organization

experiencing a major disruption. A company’s eCommerce website may be down for a few hours because of human error

or a botched upgrade, or extreme weather like hurricane Sandy or even a severe winter storm can throw an organization

into chaos. Why are there so many frequent disruptions and outages? In a joint study by Forrester and the Disaster

Recovery Journal (DRJ), we asked organizations if they felt the level of risk was increasing, and to identify the top three

risks of greatest concern. An overwhelming majority, 82%, said the level of risk was indeed increasing, and they identified:

1) technology dependency; 2) business complexity; and 3) extreme weather as top risks (see Figure 1). Specifically:

• Business processes are ever more technology dependent. In today’s digital age, the majority of processes are

dependent on technology. From communication to sales to supply chain to customer service, manual procedures

that the organization can fall back on when IT services are unavailable no longer exist. For years, organizations have

replaced manual procedures and paper records with software and online communication, file sharing and records

management. This means that if IT services are unavailable, processes are down. This also means that even planned

outages (e.g., upgrades, technology deployments, etc.) can be problematic. In fact, upgrades and deployments are

quite common; when Forrester Research asked IT executives and decision-makers to identify their top IT software

technology priorities during the next 12 months, 66% reported that upgrading packaged applications was a critical or

high priority, and 68% reported that increasing deployment and use of technologies was a critical or top priority.1

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How Organizations Are Improving Business Resiliency With Continuous IT Availability

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Given that organizations must deliver more and more services 24x7, there is a much shorter maintenance window

during which these upgrades and deployments can take place, so any mistakes made during these procedures can

extend downtime significantly. For IT operations, because agreed upon IT availability service levels with stakeholders

will encompass all downtime (planned and unplanned), so too must the approaches it develops for both local high

availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR).

• Business processes are increasingly complex. In the past, there was often a 1:1 relationship between a process and

the IT application that enabled it. Today, a typical process (e.g., financial accounting, supply chain management,

order fulfillment, customer service, HR, or communication) is a composite of dozens of interdependent IT

applications and services, some that IT maintains itself and some that partners (e.g., outsourcers, integrators, or

cloud providers) maintain. Because of the complexity of the interdependencies, the unavailability of a seemingly

non-critical application can disrupt an entire business process. As a result, IT must categorize more and more

applications and systems as mission-critical and business-critical. Moreover, because the availability discussion has

shifted from a discussion of hours and days to one of seconds and minutes, it’s no longer enough to provide HA and

DR protection for mission-critical applications; IT must extend protection to business-critical applications as well.

For most organizations, mission-critical applications can only experience seconds or minutes of downtime (typically

120 minutes or less), while for business-critical applications, it’s minutes to hours (typically 120 minutes to 6 or 8

hours). Extending this protection without breaking the bank with capital expenditures, idle infrastructure, and

significant IT overhead becomes a major challenge.

• There are more highly probable, high-impact risks. According to joint studies by Forrester and the Disaster

Recovery Journal, the most common cause of a major business disruption was extreme weather/natural disasters,

followed closely by power outages, IT failures, telecom failures, flood, and fire.2 The increasing frequency of extreme

weather events such as Hurricane Sandy is a major cause of concern. Extreme or even severe weather events have the

ability to knock out entire data centers and can also create a series of cascading events like power outages, fuel

shortages (for backup power generators), or floods that affect data center availability. Due to the growing frequency

of extreme weather, the business no longer sees availability efforts as expensive insurance policies for rare events.

Figure 1

Technology Reliance, Business Complexity, And Extreme Weather Are The Top Risks

Base: 246 global business continuity decision-makers and influencers who have conducted or are planning to conduct a risk assessment

Source: Forrester/Disaster Recovery Journal Business Continuity Preparedness Survey, Q4 2011, Forrester Research, Inc.

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How Organizations Are Improving Business Resiliency With Continuous IT Availability

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To Meet Business Demands, Many Organizations Aim For Continuous Availability

At many organizations, DR architectures and processes look the same today as they did 10, 15, and even 20 years ago. IT

operations replicate backup images off-site, while cold, warm, or hot sites stand by for failover. In addition, many

organizations often silo local HA and DR into separate functions with separate approaches — and budgets. However, with

business demands for higher availability and the increasing risks to that availability, more IT pros are unifying their HA

and DR approaches in order to achieve continuous availability. In a continuous availability approach, IT pros redesign

their IT architecture in such a way that it can withstand the loss of individual components, or even sites, while continuing

to deliver IT services. As small or large failures occur, sites and infrastructure seamlessly pick up where the other left off.

Not surprisingly, when Forrester Research asked IT decision-makers and influencers to identify their top IT infrastructure

priorities during the next 12 months, 61% reported that purchasing or upgrading business continuity and disaster recovery

(BC/DR) capabilities was a top priority (see Figure 2). This prioritization influences technology adoption and use

throughout IT. For example, 55% of organizations reported that improving BC/DR was very important to their decision to

adopt x86 server virtualization (see Figure 3). With server virtualization, IT operations can rapidly restart virtual machines

(VMs) on alternate physical hosts, configure VMs in HA or fault-tolerant configurations, or non-disruptively migrate VMs

to other hosts — within and across data centers.

Figure 2

Upgrading BC/DR Is A Top IT Priority

Base: 661 US enterprise IT hardware decision-makers

Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2012, Forrester Research, Inc.

Figure 3

Improving BC/DR Drives Adoption Of x86 Server Virtualization

Base: 324 US enterprise IT hardware decision-makers who are interested in, planning to, or have adopted x86 virtualization

Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2012, Forrester Research, Inc.

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How Organizations Are Improving Business Resiliency With Continuous IT Availability

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Active-Active Data Center Adoption Is Strong

To achieve a higher level of availability without the high cost of an idle recovery data center or data center that IT uses

simply to run deferrable workloads, many organizations are moving toward active-active data center architectures. In an

active-active data center architecture, there are production workloads operating at two or more data centers, and IT can

failover or maintain the high availability of these workloads across the data centers. An active-active data center

architecture is major first step toward achieving continuous availability. Continuous availability is a further advancement

of active-active data centers; it combines HA/DR into a single approach by running a single, stretched instance of an

application across two production data centers. To do this requires: 1) IT infrastructure and compute capacity distributed

across each site (servers, storage, network, etc.); 2) the ability to provide simultaneous application and data access between

the sites in a coherent fashion; 3) a stretched cluster across the sites; and 4) a load balancing mechanism that can route

transactions to the appropriate applications within each data center.

In January 2013, EMC Corporation commissioned Forrester Consulting to further explore the consideration and pursuit of

active-active architecture at large US organizations (1,000 employees and above). Our study found that:

• Forty-four percent of organizations surveyed have already adopted active-active data center architecture. Thirty-

two percent have applications at production data centers that can act as a failover for the other, while 12% run their

applications in HA configurations across two production data centers (see Figure 4). Those in the former category,

while not quite achieving continuous availability today, are in a better position to evolve to continuous availability in

the future. Even among organizations that architect their data centers in active-passive configurations, 21% of them

try to increase the utilization of redundant infrastructure at the recovery site by offloading secondary workloads such

as application development and testing. It’s clear that organizations are moving away from active-passive

configurations where expensive IT assets remain idle until a disruption.

• Twelve percent of organizations have already moved toward a continuous availability service environment. By

running applications in an HA configuration across their production data centers, these organizations can achieve

continuous availability. If there is a local failure of any component (e.g., IT failure or human error) or an entire site

failure (e.g., extreme weather, power outage, flood, or fire), these apps will continue processing. In addition to

providing continuous availability, this type of combined HA/DR solution can also improve application performance

by load balancing transactions across production data centers.

There is a lot of confusion in the marketplace regarding the exact definition of continuous availability (CA), and that

debate will likely continue. However, it can be helpful to compare and contrast DR, HA, and CA from a service perspective

as follows. 1) The term itself, “disaster recovery,” implies that after a failure, the organization is down, and IT requires

manual intervention to restart IT services. Once IT has made the decision to failover, the recovery process may in fact be

automated using technologies such as virtualization, but it still requires that initial human intervention. 2) High availability

implies that when a failure occurs, the recovery process is automatic — it does not need human intervention (e.g., VMs

architected in HA and fault-tolerant configurations). 3) Continuous availability implies that the failure is transparent to the

end application. In other words, the application does not see the failure.

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Figure 4

Many Organizations Have Already Adopted Active-Active Data Center Configurations

Base: 80 US enterprise decision-makers involved in their organization’s disaster recovery strategy

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of EMC Corporation, January 2013

Active-Active Data Centers Provide Operational And Financial Benefits When Forrester Consulting asked organizations with active-active data centers about the benefits of this architecture, a

staggering 89% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that it had helped them unite HA and DR into a single approach

(see Figure 5). This means that IT operations no longer has to invest separately in HA for localized failures and DR for site

failures (or potentially sacrifice one or the other because of cost); they can have both in a single approach. The unified

approach also reduces overall cost because IT operations no longer must test each approach separately or maintain

infrastructure for both. Organizations identified other benefits, including the ability to:

• Leverage off-the-shelf technology. Continuous availability solutions no longer require custom technology and

complex integration; according to our study, 69% of organizations agreed or strongly agreed that they were able to

achieve their combined HA and DR solution using off-the-shelf technology. This is important because it means that

organizations not only save money, but they also reduce the complexity by avoiding investment and maintenance of

custom technology in their environment. Complexity is a risk to availability, so avoiding unnecessary complexity and

standardizing environments where possible is ideal.

• Reduce DR capital expenditures. Normally, to achieve both HA and DR as a separate solution requires investment

in redundant infrastructure locally for HA and at the production site for DR. With a combined approach that

stretches across both sites, you can reduce the necessary capital expenditures on infrastructure. According to our

study, 67% of organizations agreed or strongly agreed that they were able to reduce capital expenditures by

combining HA and DR.

• Reduce the downtime for all IT services and applications. With increasing technology dependence, it’s important

that mission-critical, business-critical, and business-supporting applications achieve higher levels of availability.

Historically, because of the cost of traditional DR approaches, organizations could only achieve the highest levels of

availability for their mission-critical applications. With an active-active data center approach, by leveraging off-the-

shelf technologies, reducing capital expenditures, and improving utilization, they can extend HA/DR protection to

business-critical applications as well. According to our study, 86% of organizations agreed or strongly agreed that

active-active data center reduced downtime for all IT services and apps.

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How Organizations Are Improving Business Resiliency With Continuous IT Availability

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Figure 5

Continuous Availability Achieves Both Operational And Financial Benefits

Base: 36 US enterprise decision-makers involved in their organization’s disaster recovery strategy who designate all data centers as production sites

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of EMC Corporation, January 2013

More Organizations Are Ready For Continuous Availability Forty-four percent of organizations have already adopted active-active data center architectures today, and many of those

organizations without active-active data center architectures are struggling with DR. According to our study, 50% of

respondents without an active-active data center configuration are not confident that their DR capability is scalable or will

achieve their recovery objectives (see Figure 6). And 44% of the respondents agree or strongly agree that they struggle to

maintain an up-to-date DR environment either because of the rate of change in production or a lack of resources.

Figure 6

Those Without Active-Active Data Centers Are Ready For Continuous Availability

Base: 44 US enterprise decision-makers involved in their organization’s disaster recovery strategy who have designated/separate production and

recovery data centers

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of EMC Corporation, January 2013

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How Organizations Are Improving Business Resiliency With Continuous IT Availability

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These challenges, plus clear business demand for higher levels of availability, are driving many organizations to think about

a continuous availability approach. Implementing active-active data center capabilities is either a reality in many

organizations or a consideration for the future. Consider that organizations surveyed:

• Lack confidence in existing DR solutions. Eighty-two percent of respondents without active-active data center

architectures aren’t sure that their DR solution will meet all recovery objectives. This lack of confidence diminishes

the value of the recovery solution and defeats its purpose. Because traditional DR failovers are risky and costly, most

IT operations teams avoid invoking a DR plan unless it is absolutely necessary, posing a dilemma for IT operations

teams. When there is an outage, do you meet your SLAs to the organization by invoking recovery procedures, and

risk a greater outage if the recovery fails, or wait it out (e.g., if it’s a power outage or a network or system failure that

IT can attempt to remediate)? Unless the scenario is a “smoking hole,” many firms may opt to wait out an outage.

• Believe that off-the-shelf continuous availability technology is mature. Overall, 58% of all the survey respondents

have either implemented active-active data center architectures or believe that off-the-shelf technologies are mature

enough to achieve a combined HA/DR solution — 69% of the active-active data center group use off-the-shelf

components for their combined HA/DR solution, and 47% of the non-active-active data center group believe that

off-the-shelf technology is mature enough to achieve the combination.

• Have already adopted or are ready for continuous availability solutions. Today’s HA solutions are highly

automated and provide a near-immediate replacement for losses of components or services without significant

human intervention. A DR declaration, on the other hand, is risky, costly, and usually requires C-level concurrence.

To improve DR as well eliminate the need to formally “declare” a disaster and invoke a recovery plan, 56% of the

study group has already adopted some form of combined HA/DR or continuous availability solution or are

considering it — 69% of the active-active data center group has a combined HA/DR solution, and 46% of the non-

active-active data center group is interested in pursuing the combination.

Conclusion

Organizational demands for higher levels of availability will only increase. It’s not a question of if but how IT operations

will achieve these demands cost effectively. By combining HA/DR in a single approach, organizations can achieve higher

levels of availability, even continuous availability, without the huge capital expenditures and costly overhead of separate

solutions and idle recovery data centers. Moreover, they can actually transform DR, from a shaky capability that IT

operations is weary to invoke to an embedded ability to withstand the loss of individual components, or even sites, while

continuing to deliver IT services. The evidence is clear: Many organizations are already moving toward continuous

availability, many have already adopted active-active data centers and unified approaches to HA/DR using off-the-shelf

technology, and those that haven’t want to do so and believe that off-the-shelf technology is mature enough to do it.

Obviously, moving to an approach like continuous availability does not happen overnight; it is a journey. As with other IT

transformations, organizations can perform a gap analysis using desired future state for continuous availability against

current architecture and infrastructure. Using the gap analysis, they can then develop a road map that outlines both the

strategic and tactical shifts and changes that must occur to IT processes, architecture, and technology adoption, and one

that includes cost-benefit analysis to outline capital expenditures, operating costs, and cost savings and benefits.

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Methodology This Technology Adoption Profile was commissioned by EMC Corporation. To create this profile, Forrester leveraged its

Forrester/Disaster Recovery Journal Business Continuity Preparedness Survey, Q4 2011, as well as its Forrsights Hardware

Survey, Q3 2012. Forrester Consulting supplemented this data with custom survey questions asked of 80 US IT decision-

makers at organizations with 1,000 or more employees. Respondents were involved in their organization’s disaster recovery

strategy, and their organizations currently use an alternate data center that acts as a failover or recovery site for their

production data center(s). Survey questions related to current architecture of their HA/DR capabilities and performance of

those architectures in practice. The auxiliary custom survey was conducted in January 2013. For more information on

Forrester’s data panel and Tech Industry Consulting services, visit www.forrester.com.

Endnotes

1 Source: Forrsights Software Survey, Q4 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. 2 Results of the Forrester/Disaster Recovery Journal Business Continuity Preparedness Survey, Q4 2011; 61% of business

continuity decision-makers in US enterprises have invoked a business continuity plan (BCP). Of those enterprises, 55% cite

natural disasters as the cause of that invocation, more than any other cause. Power outages (49%), IT failures (36%), flood

(28%), fire (18%), and telecommunications failures (14%) were also cited as common causes of invoking a BCP.

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