Getting Disaster Recovery right

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Friday, 08 April 2011 03:54

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Backup and disaster recovery is still a subject which many SME organisations still struggle with.

Being fit for business is imperative for all organisations participating in a highly competitive global economy.

This means being able to continue to operate in the event of IT failure. With the adoption of virtualisation, and the shift towards the cloud, Diaster Recovery strategies are becoming more complex.

This shift has seen companies adopting several backup solutions to manage their different environments. Clearly a hybrid world is a complex one.

Despite universal complexities, there is no global standard for backup and Diaster Recovery. A global study of 3000 IT managers, conducted by Acronis and The Ponemon Institute set out to create a index that identified the attributes required for a business to have confidence in excelling at backup and Diaster Recovery.

The results 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.

Only a global perspective gives a true index, without it businesses are most likely to adopt the same processes, technologies and corporate styles as those closest to them and never learn anything. In athletic terms, it’s the difference between being a national 100m champion, or taking home gold for the 100m sprint at the Olympic Games.

The most confident: Germany and the Netherlands

The results read like a typical games leader board. In top spot Germany, closely followed by the Netherlands. With the strongest foundations for backup and Diaster Recovery operations, both countries have the best boarDiaster Recoveryoom buy-in (73%/69%), the best controls and procedures (85%/77%) and the best-documented policies (85%/78%). As a result, they post the highest confidence scores when it comes to recovering quickly in the event of downtime (77%/85%), both more than 50% higher than average.

Closing confidently on the leaders: Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan

Closing confidently on the leaders is the APJ (Asia Pacific and Japan) region. But there are two areas of notable difference between APJ and the Index leaders. The first lies in how much of their overall IT budget is spent on backup and Diaster Recovery. The Germans (13%) and Dutch (14%) allocate more than twice as much of their overall IT budget to backup and Diaster Recovery than Singapore (6%), Hong Kong (5%) and Japan (7%).

Secondly, a surprising number of businesses in Singapore (41%), Hong Kong (44%) and Japan (40%) claim to allocate none of their IT budget to backup and Diaster Recovery. This comparative lack of budget for backup and Diaster Recovery seems to conflict with their initial high confidence in recovering quickly from a serious incident.

The Nordic middle ground

The study found that Swedish and Norwegian businesses had very similar attitudes to backup and Diaster Recovery. While they generally scored just above average throughout the study,
Swedish (16%) and Norwegian (17%) businesses spend a lot more of their overall IT budget on backup and Diaster Recovery than any other country surveyed and almost three times as much as businesses in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.

The laggards: UK, Australia and the United States

Diaster Recoveryagging their feet near the back were the native English speaking countries. Businesses in the UK, Australia and the US all scored poorly on their ability to avoid downtime in the event of a serious incident (27%/44%/38%). Their confidence in recovering quickly (56%/36%/40%) also fell far short of the Index leaders, Germany (77%) and the Netherlands (85%).

Approximately a third of businesses in the UK (36%), Australia (36%) and the US (32%) do not have a backup and offsite Diaster Recovery strategy in place.

Room to grow: France and Italy

In last place were France and Italy. These two countries put the least priority on backup and Diaster Recovery, highlighted by the fact that 39% of French and 53% of Italian businesses claimed to spend nothing on backup or Diaster Recovery. Their spend is the lowest percentage of overall IT budget of all countries surveyed at 5% (France) and 4% (Italy) respectively.

What the index teaches us

In today’s world backup and disaster recovery is still a subject which many SME organisations still struggle with.

It’s not simply about having sufficient resources and technologies that count, businesses need to use them effectively.

When it comes to backing up in a hybrid environment, every region cited moving data between physical, virtual and cloud environments as their greatest challenge (68%). On average businesses use two or three different backup and Diaster Recovery applications, which explains why they cite complexity (48%) as their second biggest challenge.

For most small to medium size businesses, a service’s success is underpinned by its ability to deliver ease of use, cost effectiveness and flexibility. Both cloud services and virtualisation can do this, so the future is bright. Managed in the right way, from one central, easy to use solution, they can offer businesses the ultimate backup and disaster recovery protection, helping all businesses to achieve the gold medal in terms of backup and Diaster Recovery solutions.

Tags: Diaster Recovery backup SME technology

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