Backup And Recovery Challenge Businesses Globally

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

The survey of over 3,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) 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 (DR) more complicated.

The Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index

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. 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% 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%, 66% and 70% of organisations 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% and 17% respectively). However, they are the least likely to embrace cloud computing. While most countries will average an 87% increase in cloud-based IT over the next 12 months, Sweden and Norway use of the cloud will grow little more than 20% during the same period.

• The laggards: UK, Australia and the United States

Businesses in the UK, Australia and the US all scored poorly on their confidence in their ability to avoid downtime in the event of a serious incident (27%,44%,38%). When it comes to successfully recovering from a serious incident, the Australians were the least confident. Just 22% of Australian businesses felt that they would be able to recover quickly in the event of downtime, compared to a global average of 50%.

• 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%/45%) 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% and 4% 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% and 350% respectively over the next 12 months.

“It’s not surprising that IT managers across the world differ so much with regards to their attitudes towards backup and DR,” said Jason Donahue, CEO, Acronis. “However, it is clear that what SMEs 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.”