Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index

Acronis launched Global Disaster Recovery Index, a barometer which measures IT managers’ confidence in their backup and recovery operations.

                                          Global DR Index

The survey of over 3,000 small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) 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.

U.S. companies ranked 10th
in Global Backup and DR Index
On the 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. business 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.

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, documented policies and procedures for their backup and DR operations. As a result they have the highest confidence that they can recover quickly in event of system downtime, 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, virtual and cloud 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, citing a lack of trust as the key reason. While most countries will average an 87% increase in cloud-based IT over the next 12 months, the Swedish and Norwegian 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 a 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 of Acronis. "However, it is clear that what SMBs 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."

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.