98% of Organizations Don’t Tolerate More Than One Day Without Access to Critical Data

BUMI (Backup My Info!), provider of managed online backup and recovery solutions for SMBs, today announced the findings of its annual industry survey, which analyzed current approaches to backup and recovery.

              What are the most important initiatives
                         for backing up your data?

The survey, which polled CEOs, business owners and IT professionals at SMBs, found that 98% of respondents felt that more than one day to restore data after an incident was unacceptable even though almost a quarter of respondents did not regularly check the restore process of their backup operations.

"Backing up your data is only the first step in protecting your organization. What really counts is how quickly and effectively you can recover your information," said BUMI CEO, Jennifer Walzer. "A common misconception is that once backups are put into place, you’re all set. Unfortunately, data backup is not a flawless process. Glitches occur and hardware fails. It’s important to routinely test backups so that you can catch problems before they become disasters, but most organizations just don’t have the time or resources."
 
Survey Highlights:

• A large number of organizations test their restore process infrequently if at all. Nearly 24% never test and 17% only test yearly. Of the organizations that test more regularly, 27% do so quarterly, 19% monthly, 12% weekly, and less than one% test on a daily basis.
• More than one-third (36%) of respondents have no idea how much an hour of downtime costs their organizations. Of the organizations that were able to place a dollar amount on downtime, 31% estimated the cost at thousands of dollars per hour. The rest valued it at hundreds of dollars (26%), hundreds of thousands of dollars (6%), and one million dollars or more (less than 1%), respectively.
• Thirty% of respondents felt that business continuity was the most important consideration in backing up their data. Twenty% listed disaster recovery as their top priority, while the same number ranked compliance the highest. The remaining participants were mainly concerned with security (16%) and redundancy (13%).
• Virtualization is playing a role in many of the survey participants’ disaster recovery methods. Forty-one% of respondents already use virtualization and 31% plan to in the near future. The rest do not currently use virtualization and do not plan to.

"As hardware and software evolve, organizations have become less and less tolerant of downtime, and many are embracing virtualization as a solution," added Walzer. "What’s great about virtualization is that you can create a redundant disaster recovery environment much more cost-effectively by reducing hardware and data center costs. For example, ten physical servers in a production environment can be reduced to two in a disaster recovery site."

The survey was conducted from May to June 2012 and is based on responses from 104 CEOs, business owners and IT professionals across industries including financial, accounting, legal, real estate and not-for-profit – some of whom are BUMI clients and/or part of BUMI’s IT consultant program.

Snapshot of survey results