It's official - businesses are doing less for disaster recovery

At Riverbed, we spend so much time along with our partners like EMC, NetApp, HP, and others talking about disaster recovery that we assume everyone has heard us by now. I've even had those awkward cocktail party moments where I start rattling off some DR story and someone says, "Yeah, you've told me that one before." Oops.

Thankfully, the folks at Forrester are refilling my cocktail story trough with new data in their report, "State Of Enterprise Disaster Recovery Preparedness, Q2 2011."

I found two trends from this report really interesting:

• Companies are reducing the number of DR sites they manage. It's no surprise that the recession has had something to do with this. And it's not a question of ROI (Companies noted on average $350,000 per hour as the cost of downtime), it's cold hard cash that's driving companies to fewer sites.
• A whopping 65% of enterprises are interested or already implementing some sort of cloud/service based DR strategy. It's driven by the instant-on, elastic capacity nature of cloud and the desire to eliminate management of additional sites.

I think that these dynamics are certainly aligned with what's been driving the interest in DR-oriented performance solutions. Customers are looking to solutions like Steelhead to cut the cost of backing up or replicating data within their private environments; they look to solutions like Whitewater to accelerate and deduplicate cloud storage environments, and finally Cloud Steelhead to accelerate compute and applications in the cloud.

Customers tend to like the idea that Riverbed has a multi-pronged approach to optimizing disaster recovery, as we have to all recognize that priorities change, budgets change, but the need to protect your business doesn't.

I'd be interested in hearing from you - has your business been investing more or less in disaster recovery this year than in the past? And are you considering cloud as a DR strategy?