ESG Research: Data Protection SLAs and Requirements

Data protection technologies and processes are effective only when you establish clear objectives, then measure and improve them over time. Even more importantly, you must ensure that they’re aligned with your business and IT objectives.

And as more organizations move to increasingly hybrid and data-intelligent infrastructures, it has become even more important for IT leaders and the vendors that provide supporting technology to understand real-world data protection and data availability SLAs. 

To provide this insight, ESG Research surveyed 378 IT professionals who are responsible for or involved in their organization’s data-protection technology and process decisions. ESG set out to understand the current state of end-user deployments, identify gaps, and future expectations.

“As organizations increasingly shift to more hybrid and data-intelligent infrastructures, understanding real-world data protection and availability SLAs is becoming more critical for both IT practitioners and the vendors that provide supporting technology.”

The research uncovers key insights about data protection, including:

• Barely one in five organizations report that they always meet their recovery objectives.
• Respondents report that one in three applications are essential to the business, which results in more-stringent SLAs.
• Aggregated, respondents report overall average downtime of six hours, which is significantly longer than the stated objectives for either mission-critical or normal workloads.
• Only one-third of organizations report that they pass more than 80% of their disaster-recovery tests.
• Overall, 63% of business-continuity and disaster-recovery succeed, which is low relative to typical enterprise-class SLAs.

What you’ll learn in this report:

• The current state of end-user deployments from real organizations, where gaps exist, and benchmarks for future expectations.
• Findings on downtime tolerance as measured by downtime metrics, as well as SLAs from companies that experienced actual data loss.
• How real-world organizations leverage availability technologies and methods, including hybrid-cloud environments.

Modern data protection is a critical piece of data center strategy that encompasses multiple platforms and technologies, delivers efficient protection and restoration of critical data and applications, and ultimately allows you to derive real business value from your protection data.