Virtualization And The Cloud: Comes With Major Backup and Recovery Challenges?

Acronis, a provider of backup and recovery solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today launched the Global Disaster Recovery Index, a (self-serving) barometer which measures IT managers’ confidence in their backup and recovery operations.

The survey of over 3,000 small and medium-sized businesses conducted by the Ponemon Institute revealed that 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.

The vast majority (68%) 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 more complicated.

On a 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%) reported they were concerned about their ability to avoid substantial downtime in the event of a serious incident.

With only 40% saying they were confident in recovering quickly, and 38% 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%) on backup and DR than other countries.

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.

The survey was conducted by the Ponemon Institute across 13 countries in October 2010. Over 3,000 IT practitioners were surveyed in small- to mid-market organizations with no more than 1,000 seats.