Most Businesses Don't Have Adequate Recovery Technology
April 17, 2015

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

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Unscheduled downtime has a dramatic financial impact on businesses of all sizes, yet most businesses don't have adequate recovery technologies in place, according to an independent national survey of IT professionals conducted by Dimensional Research and commissioned by Axcient — 79 percent reported they have had a major IT failure within the past two years, and only 7 percent were confident that they could recover operations within two hours.

The survey found that the vast majority of organizations identify backup as critical, yet most also believe that current methodologies are incomplete. Furthermore, the current solutions for backup and recovery are complex with 90 percent of IT professionals using multiple backup and recovery tools, and 91 percent report that using multiple tools causes issues.

With increasingly complex and critical IT environments, companies are looking for ways to fully protect their business, while at the same time providing easier and faster recovery times. To cope, an overwhelming 90 percent report that they have multiple backup and recovery tools in place, and more than 60 percent say that these tools have duplicate functionality.

To make matters worse, 91 percent of organizations report that there are challenges in using multiple tools, including the learning curve of utilizing multiple solutions, increased cost of licenses and maintenance, or the management of multiple vendors.

To combat these challenges, the cloud has emerged as a viable alternative to traditional backup and disaster recovery, with the vast majority (89 percent) seeing value in a cloud-based solution for business protection and recovery. Benefits cited include faster recovery time after a disaster (53 percent), less IT time spent on backup and recovery tasks (50 percent), immediate access to applications and data in the event of a disaster (45 percent), ability to fully recover (44 percent), and overall cost reduction (36 percent). Additionally, more than half are more confident using cloud-based recovery solutions in the case of system failure for recovering all operations in two hours or less.

"Every year, businesses lose more than $40 billion due to application downtime and permanent data loss. This research gives a sense of why. With multiple, disparate, legacy tools for backup and recovery, current solutions are broken. As a result, users are unable to recover their systems in the event of an IT outage, or even worse, a disaster," said Justin Moore, CEO of Axcient.

Overview of Survey Findings

Backup is critical, but incomplete for most organizations:

■ Unscheduled downtime has significant business implications

■ Applications matter: mid-size companies are backing data and critical applications as well

■ Backup has moved beyond just mission-critical, but there are still gaps

Major business interruptions do happen, and IT is held responsible:

■ Major IT failures are a fact of life; especially for small companies

■ Only 7 percent were very confident that they could recover operations within two hours

■ Recovery is very disruptive to the IT team

■ Mid-level IT staff are held responsible for lost data

■ 50 percent say someone could lose their job if data is lost

Fragmented backup tools cause significant problems:

■ 90 percent of SMBs have multiple backup and recovery tools

■ Most have backup and recovery tools with duplicate functionality

■ More than half use different tools to back up physical and virtual servers

■ Multiple tools are needed to support all environment backup

■ 91 percent report challenges using multiple backup and recovery tools

■ 71 percent report using multiple backup tools can increase risk

Cloud recovery very desirable, still a growing market:

■ One-third use cloud-based backup and recovery

■ 89 percent see value in cloud-based disaster recovery

■ 74 percent use a non-cloud based secondary site for recovery

■ 79 percent of those with a non-cloud secondary site would make a change if they had resources


Survey Methodology: In October 2014, IT and security professionals were invited to participate in an online survey on the topic of IT backup and recovery for SMBs. A total of 453 respondents across the United States and Canada, who worked at companies between 50 and 1,000 employees, completed the survey. Participants included IT executives, IT team managers, hands-on IT professionals and consultants, and represented a wide range of industry verticals.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest
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