By Paul Hemsley

Public and private organisations may suffer data loss due to virtualisation processes, where internal IT may not be able to recover the data.

Data recovery and information management company Kroll Ontrack conducted a survey on virtualisation at vForum events in Sydney and Singapore, showing two thirds of organisations frequently experience data loss from virtualisation.

Kroll Ontrack APAC general manager, Adrian Briscoe said there has been a gradual increase in the company's virtual recovery work because people are embracing the virtualisation recovery work.

There are physical servers not being physical servers anymore rather being virtual servers hosting up to 20 virtual servers on one physical box, Mr Briscoe said.

"It's an increase in situations with a user error causing data loss, so we did a survey in APAC and Europe and the figures are all basically coming up as the same in the US," Mr Briscoe said.

He said 65 per cent of organisations have experienced some kind of data loss with the virtual environment.

"In Europe, it was 73 per cent and 74 per cent in APAC," he said.

According to Mr Briscoe, virtualisation is a "wonderful thing" because there are fewer servers to contend with as they are all on one physical device, but awareness of data loss is still needed because "it is not a fool proof system".

Kroll Ontrack's data recovery work from physical and mechanical error comes to 78 per cent, but with virtual, there was a swing to about 60 per cent from user error.

The files may be corrupted, deleted or "there could even be an enemy within", Mr Briscoe said.

"Because the virtualisation is existing in the environment that it does, the data is being spread across many discs, so the complexities of moving or doing anything are very much greater because it's spanning so many different types of devices."

Mr Briscoe said Kroll Ontrack has conducted data recoveries for government clients, but is unable to name these clients due to confidentiality agreements.

"Governments are seeing the same issues as commercial organisations with managing virtualisation, so this is where they are trying to keep the accessibility of those services constant,"Mr Briscoe said.

He said these organisations may be moving a virtual machine (VM) via vMotion from one location to another on a network, and finally end up with a file that is zero kilobytes.

"Many organisations have to re-write their disaster recovery plans to incorporate their back-up of virtualisation

"I think organisations need to keep re-assessing and keep testing to make sure those plans are still valid because new technology comes through and new versions of virtualisation come through," Mr Briscoe said.

Concerning virtualisation and cloud computing as a form of outsourcing data storage, every outsourcing agreement would have terms and conditions, Mr Briscoe said.

"If your cloud provider is offering a service where they're going to host the data, you need to question how quickly can they recover or restore your data in times of emergency," he said.

According to Mr Briscoe, there are cloud providers in Sydney offering services to companies who are choosing not to take that option.

Rather they are backing up their servers and running those virtual servers 24/7 "in the hope that nothing goes astray".

"They're seeing the cost benefit of not having that service and 99.9 per cent of the time, it works perfectly, but there's always that remainder where something goes wrong and the whole thing comes collapsing down," he said.

Mr Briscoe said people should be aware of testing their back-ups and making sure their disaster recovery plans are working.