Increased competition in BCDR market

The North American business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) services market is likely to continue to grow over the next few years, primarily due to the burgeoning demand for network security, storage and regulatory compliance services among enterprises, reports News Wire Today

While mounting concerns over possible financial and productivity losses arise from network downtime, growth in business activity over the Web and changing regulatory compliance requirements is also likely to drive demand in this market.

In addition, competition in the BCDR market is expected to increase, as existing IT vendors expand their market reach and others such as telecoms service providers enhance their product portfolios to include an array of business continuity services.

For most businesses, 'protecting the data` is the lynchpin that all other business continuity and disaster recovery aspects rely on. But often, other measures need to be considered in order to ameliorate data replication and provide a business continuity solution.

"One of these is to transform the existing IT infrastructure into a virtual infrastructure, which provides organisations with the key to greater flexibility as their business needs change. Virtual infrastructure works by providing a layer of abstraction between computing, storage and networking hardware, and the software that it runs on," says Ian Masters, sales director at Double-Take Software.

Within this environment, users see resources as dedicated solely to them, while the administrator is able to manage and optimise those resources globally across the enterprise.

When a disaster strikes, the difference between organisations that have well-developed business continuity plans and those that don`t is easy to see. The prepared move quickly into new premises, recover their data and get back to work, reports ITWales.

The rest have little choice but to close down or restrict their operations until a solution can be found. The delays can be expensive and, in the worst cases, threaten the organisation`s existence.

In a sobering report, the British Chambers of Commerce noted 80% of organisations that suffered a critical incident never re-opened and went out of business within 18 months.