Backup and Archive Top Applications Planned for the Cloud

Zetta, Inc. announced the results of a cloud storage and data protection survey of more than 230 IT professionals that revealed that half of them were planning to use cloud storage.

The survey covered various industries, with the top five being government, education, software and technology, financial services, and manufacturing. The most cited benefits of the cloud were lower costs and dynamic growth, at 49 percent each. Applications most often planned for the cloud included backup - 44 percent of the respondents said - and online archive, per 38 percent of them.
 
As expected, security and privacy were mentioned as a barrier to cloud storage adoption by 60 percent of the IT pros, up from the 47 percent that Zetta's 2009 survey revealed. The most cited data protection issue was recovery time, with 58 percent of the respondents claiming this problem.


       Current Methods of Protecting Unstructured Data

 
Per Zetta's survey, 65 percent of the respondents were not able to consistently achieve their own Recovery Time Objective (RPO). Another research report recently released by Aberdeen Group and sponsored by Zetta, titled Small and Mid-Sized Organizations Gain Disaster Recovery Advantages Using Cloud Storage, shows that companies utilizing public cloud storage are, on average, meeting all of their Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) while organizations not using the cloud are regularly missing their RTO goals.
 
The Aberdeen report also found that companies that utilize public cloud storage recover almost four-times faster from an IT-related downtime event. The report revealed that companies that utilize public cloud storage are far more likely to have a superior disaster recovery program. Forty-six percent (46%) of public cloud storage users were found to have the highest performing disaster recovery programs.
 
"This year's survey brings to light the pain felt by enterprises in protecting their data, particularly in times of crisis or recovery," points out Jeff Bell, Zetta director of corporate marketing. "The Aberdeen study clearly shows that leveraging the cloud for data protection makes a significant, positive difference."