1. B U S I N E S S T R E N D S B R I E F
B U S I N E S S T R E N D S B R I E F / 1
Crash Insurance: Protect Your Business
with Virtualization
No business is immune to the disruption that natural disasters can cause. Take one
recent case: Hurricane Sandy. The insured losses on businesses are estimated at more
than $20 billion, and the total economic damage at more than $50 billion.1
The deadly
2011 Tsunami in Japan was even more devastating, impacting 312,000 employees in
715 industries.2
Similarly, after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, only 35 percent of
businesses remained open. Five years later, 71 percent of businesses said sales had
yet to reach pre-Katrina levels.3
In Europe, the Mideast, and Africa, one in four
organizations experienced a significant data loss in 2011, with three quarters of them
admitting they were not confident that they could fully recover their systems/data.4
Other Types of Disasters Abound
Distributed Denial of service (DDOS) attacks increased almost 20 percent in 2012 over
2011.6
Manmade errors, such as construction projects that inadvertently knock out
power or network lines, have also increased over that same time period. Overall, the
average hourly cost of IT downtime has increased almost 65 percent between 2010
and 2012, peaking at $161,000 per hour in 2012.7
COMMON CAUSES OF
SYSTEM OUTAGES
• Natural disaster – This might include
events like earthquakes, floods,
storms, hurricanes or tornados.
• Manmade – Construction projects are
known to knock out power or
network connections as a result of
careless digging.
• Operator error – This can include
operator error such as
misconfiguration or result from a
poorly planned update or upgrade to
software or infrastructure.
• Service demand – Spikes in demand
for a service can be predicted as in
the case of seasonal or event based
activity. The magnitude, however,
can be much larger than originally
predicted.
• Attack – Activities such as DDoS
events and hacking may not only
impact service availability but could
have longer term effects when they
impact compliance or loss of
company intellectual property.
51%
74%
Only 51 percent of small businesses
have an IT business continuity plan in
place, ensuring IT systems are up and
running within 24 hour5
74 percent of large businesses have
such a plan in place
$0
$50,000
$100,000
$150,000
$200,000
$250,000
AverageCostPerHourofDowntime
Best-in-Class Average Laggard All Respondents
$60,000
$118,600
$110,000
$98,000
$212,100
$115,700
$97,850
$161,000
Jun-10
Feb-12
n=100
Source: Aberdeen Group, February 2012
Technology Adopters and the Cost of Downtime
51%
74%

2. B U S I N E S S T R E N D S B R I E F / 2
Businesses with limited resources have a lot to lose. Today, on average, the typical
business possesses more than 100 servers, desktops, and laptops, and produces 40
terabytes of data every year.8
Those systems and that data represent some of the
most valuable business assets you possess: Transaction records. Human resource
records. Historical financial data. Manufacturing and inventory information. Additionally,
you risk losing customers to competitors as they go to another site when yours is
down. Your reputation can take a hit for being unreliable. Employee productivity can
plummet if the applications they need to do their jobs are unavailable. The list of
damages due to systems outages goes on and on.
You need a way to protect everything from your applications, infrastructure and the
data that resides within them, and ensure you can get your business up and running
quickly after a disaster. Virtualization is one way—some industry experts say the best
way—to achieve this.
Businesses are accelerating their push toward virtualization
The good news is that more businesses are better prepared today than in the recent
past. Thirty-eight percent of businesses—the highest percentage yet—have already
adopted server virtualization, with 34 percent of executives saying that disaster
preparedness had a moderate to large effect on their decision to do so.10
Of course,
that means that 66 percent of businesses have yet to make a connection between
the importance of virtualization and business continuity—so there is still more
educating to do. But the most interesting result of a 2012 Symantec report on
disaster preparedness is that of the companies that have virtualized, 71 say they
have improved disaster plans as a result.11
The future looks even more encouraging for better business continuity and disaster
recovery preparedness. In another study by Catalys, results showed that 38 percent
of small and midsize businesses will be more than 80 percent virtualized by 2014,
compared to just 20 percent who have achieved that level of virtualization
penetration today. Within two years, 75 percent of businesses of all sizes are
expected to expand virtualization programs to include business-critical applications.
This is all true for server virtualization. But desktop virtualization is also a key tool for
protecting data—specifically, the data that is now stored on individual desktop PCs
and mobile devices. With desktop virtualization, all data and applications are moved
off individual machines and into a centralized desktop in the datacenter, where it can
be managed and protected more effectively. This helps companies better manage
their end users’ behavior with PCs, laptops, and mobile devices. Rather than having to
depend on individual users to back up their files, all of it resides in a central location
where it can be backed up as part of corporate backup and recovery procedures. This
solves the No. 1 challenge named in a recent Spiceworks study with regard to
managing end users: maintaining security and compliance.12
How virtualization protects your business
Virtualization changes all that by allowing multiple operating systems and
applications to run on a single physical machine. Each of these “virtual machines”
operates like a standalone physical machine would, using only as much of the physical
host’s computing power as needed. This allows you to run multiple operating systems
and applications on the same physical host, and machine utilization goes way up. You
can quickly and easily make copies of these virtual machines, and store them in a safe
place. Then you can restore the data and applications in the event of an outage.
OTHER CHALLENGES TO
EFFECTIVE BUSINESS CONTINUITY
AND DISASTER RECOVERY
According to the annual Acronis
Global Disaster Recovery Index 20129
,
even more challenges can arise other
than the disasters themselves:
• Almost half (47 percent) of respondents
feel that business executives are not
supportive of their backup and disaster
recovery operations—either financially
or politically.
• IT confidence that backup procedures
and policies were well documented
dropped by 44 percent between 2011
and 2012.
• Businesses are 16 percent less
confident about having enough
disaster recovery controls and
procedures in place compared to last
year’s survey.
• Two out of every five cited lack of
budget and IT resources as the main
barriers to successful disaster recovery.
Crash Insurance: Protect Your Business with Virtualization

3. VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
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Crash Insurance: Protect Your Business with Virtualization
How does that help with business continuity and disaster recovery? Think about
implementing business continuity and disaster recovery strategies as crash
insurance—you hope you’ll never have to use them. But if disaster does strike, such
preparations can make the difference between bankruptcy and survival.
Currently, many businesses still use traditional tape systems to back up their
applications and data. The problem with this is the speed at which you can recover: a
typical recovery using tape-based systems can take one or two days. When your
machines are virtualized, you can create virtual copies of systems and data on virtual
machines dedicated to disaster recovery. Then, if a system goes down, you can
completely restore applications and data in a matter of hours. You don’t have to rebuild
servers, applications, or even operating systems because they already exist on other
virtual machines—the servers you have earmarked for disaster recovery—elsewhere.
Of course, when you’re building this environment, you should make sure that the
virtual machines you have dedicated to disaster recovery are fully maintained and
managed in the same way as your production environment. In a virtual environment,
you can restore your data and applications much faster than if you were moving tapes
or recovering entire servers.
Conclusion
Don’t be one of those businesses that will have to close its doors due to disaster-
caused system outages. By ensuring you have a virtualization or cloud computing
solution in place with priority given to development of solid recovery plan, you will be
able to get back online within hours instead of days, helping and perhaps even saving
your business from shutting its doors.
SIX STEPS FOR CRASH-
PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS
• Step 1: Assess Your Risk. Define
how much downtime is acceptable, or
how fast you need to be able to
recover applications and data.
• Step 2: Develop a disaster recovery
plan. Lay out precisely what needs to
happen if any or all of your systems
were impacted by a disaster. For
example, do you want your systems
to automatically failover to systems
located in a remote site? How will
your users access those systems?
What will you do if no one can access
your main data center due to flooding
or other dangerous conditions?
Consider the various scenarios, and
put plans into place that will address
those scenarios.
• Step 3: Evaluate technology options.
How can virtualization help you
implement your disaster-recovery
plan? Which vendor is right for you?
• Step 4: Put the right processes and
policies in place. Technology is
useless if not deployed properly.
Make sure you have created
processes that streamline disaster
recovery and business continuity
operations, and document them.
• Step 5: Get senior management on
board. Translate the technical
language into business terms. For
example, create a chart showing
how much revenue will be lost per
hour of downtime for each business-
critical application.
• Step 6: Regularly test your disaster
preparedness plan. This should be
completed at least once a quarter.
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“Hurricane Sandy Slams Small Business: ‘Losing My Business Means Losing My House,” by Chelsea Emery. Reuters. November 1, 2012.
“2011 Impact Report of Japan Earthquake and Tsunami: Preliminary Business Impact Analysts for High Impact Areas of
Japan.” Dun and Bradstreet 2012.
“Louisiana Small Businesses Five Years Post-Katrina.” March 2011. http://perc.net/files/LDRF_stat_report.pdf
“Disaster and Recovery Landscape: EMEA 2011.” EMC.
Regus Business Confidence Index. Issue 4 – April 2011
Prolexic Global DDOS Attack Report, Q4 2012. http://www.prolexic.com/kcresources/attack-report/prolexic-quarterly-global-
ddos-attack-report-q412-011713/Prolexic_Quarterly_Global_DDoS_Attack_Report_Q412_011413.pdf.
“Disaster Avoidance and Disaster Recovery: Making your Datacenter Disaster Resilient.” The Aberdeen Group. 2012.
Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index 2012.
Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index 2012.
Symantec Report on Disaster Preparedness 2012
Ibid.
“Trends Around Desktop Virtualization for Small and Mid-sized Organizations.” Spiceworks. April 2012.