Lack of Backup Among Small Businesses Deploying Virtualized Servers

In a recent survey of more than 650 small businesses worldwide, Symantec Corp. found strong interest in virtualization technologies, although deployments within the small business segment are still in their early stages.

Key obstacles, like those facing organizations of all sizes, were reported to be budget and staffing concerns.

The survey revealed that small businesses interested in the technology appear to be struggling with its adoption in their environments. More than half relied on third-party expertise for help.

Most surprising was the discovery of the extensive lack of backup and security among small businesses having deployed virtualized servers.

Symantec commissioned The Applied Research Company to field the Small Business Virtualization Poll in May 2011. They contacted a total of 658 small businesses in 28 countries, each with between five and 249 employees. The businesses represented a variety of industries; in each case, the respondent was responsible for computing resources at the company.

The poll has a reliability of 95% confidence with 3.8% margin of error.

Perhaps due to the immaturity of this market, small businesses are neglecting to protect their data and systems in virtual environments

Remarkably, this survey revealed the great extent to which small businesses do not sufficiently protect their data and systems with regular backups and security safeguards.

For example, just 15 percent of small businesses respondents always backup their virtualized servers. In contrast, 23 percent either backup them infrequently or not at all. Why not? Fifty-three percent cited budgetary issues, while 23 percent said staffing issues were at fault.

                              What is the status of backing up
                                    your virtualized servers

                                         What is keeping up you
                                from more completely backing up
                                      your virtualized servers

Incomplete security practices are apparently also common among small businesses. On average, only 40 percent of virtualized servers for each small business deploying them are completely secured. Twenty percent are somewhat or completely unsecured.

As with lack of sufficient backups, budgetary problems were cited as the main reason by 49 percent of survey respondents. Thirty-five percent cited staffing issues

Of the small businesses that consider all of their virtualized servers to be ‘somewhat’ or ‘completely’ secured, 78 percent have no antivirus protection installed, 48 percent don’t have a firewall and 74 percent have not implemented any form of endpoint protection.

Based on these results, lack of data protection in small businesses’ virtual environments should be addressed in both current and planned virtual server deployments.