A new survey of more than 200 IT professionals in North America by Quest Software reports that 73 percent of organizations now rank restoring critical applications alongside recovering lost data as their top backup and recovery concern. But 78 percent of organizations are still creating recovery objectives focused on data, servers or a combination of both. Only five percent of respondents said they create their recover objectives based on applications.

"It's my job to ensure that our clients' mission-critical systems are protected at all times, and when it comes to backup, almost every organization I work with now has requirements to come up with faster recovery times than ever before," says John O'Brien, founder and president of J.O'B Consultants. "I tell them unequivocally that if you're concerned about meeting your recovery objectives, you better have a backup system that enables you to quickly restore your critical applications, recovering the data alone simply isn't enough anymore."

"Not only have end users become more and more dependent on the services that IT provides, but their expectations for availability and continuity are more demanding than ever before as well," adds Ken Kearley, corporate applications manager for Florida College. "When a service goes down, today's end users expect it to be restored immediately, and it's imperative that we in IT can meet that expectation."

And there may be a growing gap between user expectation and what IT can deliver. Among organizations that outsource to service providers for applications, Quest found 15 percent of respondents indicated there was a gap between their formal service level agreements (SLAs) and the actual service level expectations (SLEs) of their employees and customers.