While attitudes towards backup and recovery differ widely around the world, businesses everywhere want a single backup and recovery solution for physical, virtual and cloud environments, according to a global survey. The vast majority (68 percent) of IT managers agree that their greatest challenge in a hybrid environment is moving data between the three environments, yet the average business currently uses at least two or three separate backup solutions making disaster recovery (DR) more complicated.
On the global scale, U.S. small- and medium-sized companies fell short of the international average, ranking 10th overall for backup and DR readiness. Approximately a third of U.S. businesses reported having no backup and DR strategy in place, citing lack of budget and resources as the primary reasons.
Without these resources and technologies to fortify a DR strategy, more than half (62 percent) reported they were concerned about their ability to avoid substantial downtime in the event of a serious incident. With only 40 percent saying they were confident in recovering quickly, and 38 percent believing their IT staffs were qualified to handle DR operations in response to an event or disaster. Overall, the findings revealed that the U.S. spent consistently less (10 percent) on backup and DR than other countries.
Key findings include:
-- Very confident:Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland: This group of countries has the best boardroom buy-in, controls and procedures and documented policies for their backup and DR operations. As a result they have the highest confidence that they can recover quickly in the event of system downtime, more than 50 percent more confident than the average.
-- Confident: Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan: This group has the best qualified staff in place to execute backup and DR operations in the wake of a serious incident. Surprisingly they are the most likely to use separate backup solutions for physical and virtual environments (67 percent, 66 percent and 70 percent of organizations respectively).
-- The Middle Ground: Norway and Sweden: Swedish and Norwegian businesses spend a lot more of their overall IT budget on backup and DR than any other country surveyed (16 percent and 17 percent respectively). However, they are the least likely to embrace cloud computing. While most countries will average an 87 percent increase in cloud-based IT over the next 12 months, Sweden and Norway use of the cloud will grow little more than 20 percent during the same period.
-- The laggards -- UK, Australia and the United States: Businesses in the UK, Australia and the U.S. all scored poorly on their confidence in their ability to avoid downtime in the event of a serious incident (27 percent/44 percent/38 percent). When it comes to successfully recovering from a serious incident, the Australians were the least confident. Just 22 percent of Australian businesses felt that they would be able to recover quickly in the event of downtime, compared to a global average of 50 percent.
-- Room to grow: France and Italy: These countries are the most likely to admit that they do not have an offsite backup and DR strategy (41 percent/45 percent) and the least likely to be able to recover quickly from downtime. They spend the lowest percentage of overall IT budget of all countries surveyed at 5 percent and 4 percent respectively. Server virtualisation adoption rates are also among the lowest. However, French and Italian businesses expect to see their use of cloud grow by 23 percent and 350 percent respectively over the next 12 months.
Comment from Jason Donahue, CEO of Acronis: It's not surprising that IT managers across the world differ so much with regards to their attitudes towards backup and DR. However, it is clear that what SMBs are looking for, regardless of location is one reliable, easy-to-use solution which spans across physical, virtual and cloud platforms. By launching this Index, we hope businesses will benefit from comparing their backup practices against national and global benchmarks.
About the survey: The Acronis-sponsored survey -- the Global Disaster Recovery Index, a "barometer" of IT managers' confidence in their backup and recovery operations -- was conducted by the Ponemon Institute across 13 countries in October 2010. More than 3,000 IT practitioners were surveyed in small- to mid-market organizations with no more than 1,000 seats. To create the Index, each country was ranked based on its average responses from 11 questions about their confidence in backup and DR readiness, capabilities and practices. Questions covered technology, resources, procedures and executive buy-in.
Contact: Details of how the index was calculated and where each country appears can be found here.
Contact: http://www.acronis.com
No comments:
Post a Comment