CIO Survey Reveals Weakness In Virtualisation Data Protection

Veeam Software, provider of backup, replication and virtualisation management solutions for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, has announced the results of its annual Virtualisation Data Protection Report.

This report is Veeam’s third study into the impact of virtualisation on data protection, backup and recovery strategies. The independent survey of 500 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) across the USA and Europe found that enterprises are still not experiencing the full benefits that virtualisation brings to data protection, with capabilities, complexity and cost all affecting implementations. Indeed, in a number of areas enterprises’ data protection capabilities have actually diminished since the last report in late 2011.

Key Findings

• 68 percent of CIOs feel that their backup and recovery tools will become less effective as the amount of data and servers in their organisation grows.

• Recovery of virtual servers is only a little faster than that of physical servers, at 5 and 6 hours respectively. This is actually worse than in 2011, when recovery took 4 and 5 hours.

• Every hour of downtime costs an enterprise $324,793: meaning that downtime is, on average, costing organisations at least $1.6 million per incident.

• Recovering individual files and application items can take even longer: for example, recovering individual emails takes on average 14 hours.

• Regardless of recovery times, enterprises experience problems with more than 1 in 6 recoveries.

• 88 percent of CIOs experience capability-related challenges with backup and recovery, 84 percent with complexity and 87 percent with cost: showing that data protection is still not a simple task.

• 58 percent of CIOs are planning to change their backup tool for virtual environments by 2014.

• Currently, virtual infrastructure accounts for 51 percent of enterprise servers, with this expected to grow to 63 percent in 2014.

CIOs are not blind to the data protection issues these growing virtual infrastructures present. 88 percent of CIOs identified capability challenges affecting their ability to backup and recover virtual servers, while 84 percent recognised complexity challenges and 87 percent cost issues. Similarly, 77 percent of those enterprises using agent-based backup tools were experiencing problems or management issues with the technology. These included excessively complex management (43 percent), backups failing too often (32 percent), restores failing too often (28 percent), the cost of the technology (20 percent) and agents slowing the performance of servers (18 percent).

One sign that enterprises are beginning to recognise this is that 58 percent are planning to change the backup tool used for virtual servers by 2014. The primary driver for this is financial, with 51 percent changing due to Total Cost of Ownership and 42 percent due to current hardware and software costs. Complexity is a reason to change for 47 percent, while failure to meet Recovery Time Objectives (32 percent) and Recovery Point Objectives (24 percent) are also factors.

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Ratmir Timashev, President and CEO, Veeam Software, said, “At first glance, the fears of CIOs look to be correct: despite the potential for faster, more efficient data protection that virtualisation offers and the advances modern data protection tools can provide, recovery times have increased since 2011. This apparent loss of momentum in data protection comes down to two influences. First, virtual infrastructure is constantly growing: as well as forming the majority of IT infrastructure now, it will continue to grow in the future. Second, organisations are not updating their data protection tools and strategies to match. For example, the majority of enterprises still deploy agents for backup and recovery. This approach works for physical environments but is unnecessary and ill-suited to the virtual infrastructure. Until organisations stop using a physical-world mind-set to view the technology, they will never be able to unlock its full potential.”

He added, “Virtualisation is reaching a turning point. Organisations have realised the benefits that the technology can bring on its own: now they are beginning to find out what it is truly capable of when managed and applied correctly. Modern data protection tools, specifically built for virtualisation, can unlock this potential as well as eliminate many of the capability, complexity and cost issues IT departments face. For example, reducing the cost of techniques such as replication allows enterprises to protect far more of their vital infrastructure from server downtime, saving millions of dollars in the process. Virtualising recovery means enterprises can test more of their backups, rather than the mere 7 percent regularly tested at present. Most importantly, using the appropriate tool for the job means that CIOs can recover either individual items or entire servers in far less than five hours.”