Outsourcing Your DR is a Money-Saver
Are you looking to save costs in your IT budget? Then outsourcing your disaster recovery may be a good option for you, according to an article on datacenterjournal.com. Computer Economics recently released its “IT Outsourcing Statistics 2015/2016” study, which found that the outsourcing of disaster recovery ranks the highest for successfully lowering costs when compared with 10 other commonly outsourced functions. The study found that 92% of organizations that outsource disaster recovery have equal or lowered costs than when performing the function in-house. That is a significant improvement to how disaster recovery performed in the same study one year ago, in which it came in seventh place. It is also worthy to note that DR finished 6% higher than the number two finisher on this year’s list, desktop support, which came in at 86%.
Historically, the study has shown that organizations generally outsourced disaster recovery for to reduce the risks associated with doing it in-house. So this new finding is a boost to disaster recovery as a service providers, proving that they are not only experts in DR but also a cost-effective option for companies as well. The maturation of disaster recovery as a service is also a likely cause to the increase as well as the service is now a trusted solution. Another factor that contributes to DR topping this year’s list is that utilizing third-party cloud infrastructure is more cost-effective because the company itself does not have to maintain the excess capacity to house its own disaster recovery solutions.
Some other key findings of the study include:
• Outsourcing spend as a percentage of the IT budget remained unchanged at the median year over year, ending a downward trend for this metric over the previous three years. Spending on outsourcing is now rising at a rate that is in step with IT operational budgets as a whole.
• More organizations are outsourcing IT security work, web/e-commerce systems and application hosting than in previous years. On the other hand, fewer organizations are outsourcing help desk, desktop support and application maintenance functions.
• Proving the growing strength of SaaS, 65% of organizations that outsource application hosting are planning to increase the amount of work they outsource. This is also the most frequently outsourced function according to the study.
• The outsourcing of data center operations, web/e-commerce operations, IT security and application hosting have the highest success rates for improving IT service levels over performing the same functions in-house.
• The outsourcing of disaster recovery, web/e-commerce systems, IT security and desktop support deliver the best value. The outsourcing of these functions can lower cost and improve service levels.
The full study profiles outsourcing activity for 11 IT functions, including application development, application hosting, application maintenance, data center operations, database administration, desktop support, disaster recovery services, help desk services, IT security, network operations and web/e-commerce systems.
