This IDC study offers a view of how the role of storage replication has changed and become a strategic component of business continuity and an underpinning of high availability. It also discusses the relationship between storage replication to ensure data availability and clustering and availability software (CLAS) to ensure application availability — and how both approaches are related to the overarching goal of business continuity.

"As organizations continue to be held accountable for their data, employing disaster preparedness and minimizing cost of downtime to ensure operational viability are critical elements of understanding how much risk you can tolerate," said Rhoda Phillips, research manager, Storage Software. "A disaster recovery plan is going to depend on how data intensive your business is and what your company's appetite for risk is."

"All businesses would be impacted, to one degree or another, by failure or downtime in one or more of their mission-critical systems," said Jean S. Bozman, research vice president, Enterprise Platforms group. "Therefore, the key question is this: How soon will you be able to resume operations before you put your company's information in jeopardy? The answer to this question will show that employing storage replication software and application availability remains a critical element of disaster recovery and business continuity planning."