83% of UK Businesses Rely on Tape

Tape storage is still a key part of IT business strategy and is used widely by most UK businesses according to a survey published by Overland Storage.

The key finding from the survey of 1,000 UK businesses conducted by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Overland Storage, was that the vast majority (83%) still use tape storage systems to back up and protect their business data.

Even with the adoption of disk-based storage solutions over the past decade, tape remains widely used as a key part of most organisations’ data management and protection strategies:

• The most common use case for tape storage is off-site backup (70%), a large proportion (61%) continues to rely on tape for on-site backups
• 43% cited archiving as the third most popular use case, while over a third (34%) have turned to tape based solutions to ensure compliance with data retention regulations
• A large segment of respondents (28%) still utilise tape for near-line storage

Disk storage solutions have, however, made significant inroads over the years. Like-for-like onsite disk storage capacities have surpassed those of tape, with the average enterprise managing 101TB of disk storage compared to 67TB of tape storage. Despite this, the majority (54%) of enterprises expect to invest in tape storage systems in the coming five years, with almost a quarter (24%) expecting to purchase a tape system within the 12 months.

When it came to data backup best practices and the frequency of moving data to tape, ostensibly to free up disk storage, less than a third (31%) confirmed it was done on a weekly basis. Although the majority (52%) moved data across to tape within a month of it being created, a surprisingly large 10% admitted to doing this only on an annual basis. Almost a quarter (24%) of those surveyed lacked automated data movement tools and had to move data to tape manually.

Archiving frequency best practice trends were slightly better. Just under half (45%) archived old data on a weekly or better basis, rising to over three-quarters (76%) who did so on a monthly basis. When asked "will archiving to the cloud kill off tape" a very small minority (8%) agreed.

Commenting on the survey findings Andy Walsky, VP EMEA Sales at Overland Storage, said: "Tape storage systems have played, and will continue to play, an integral part of the data management and protection strategy of UK enterprises for many years. Tape continues to offer a significant price/performance advantage over traditional disk-based solutions and remains the choice for off-site backup and archiving. And, despite the buzz around archiving to the cloud, tape will remain the premier archiving choice for many years to come."