47% of Large Enterprise Replicating More Than Half of Their Data to DR Sites

Sepaton, Inc. announced the results of Volume II of the Sepaton Data Protection Index, an annual survey of large enterprises in North America and Europe with at least 1,000 employees and at least 50TB of primary data to protect.

The survey elicited responses from 93 IT professionals across a range of vertical industries to answer questions related to DR challenges for large enterprise backup environments.
 
Sepaton conducted its fourth annual survey to answer these questions and to quantify current data protection and DR challenges for large enterprises and big data backup environments. Specific areas covered by the survey included data growth and its impact on data protection resources; business objectives and technical requirements related to data protection; data protection technologies currently in use and planned for the next year; and data protection challenges caused by massive data growth in large enterprises.

Key findings based on the survey results:

• Large enterprise backup environments are replicating more than half of their data to DR sites. Most respondents to the survey implemented an electronic remote replication strategy for DR. Nearly half (47%) of respondents are replicating more than 50% of their data to remote location.
• Electronic remote replication is a growing trend in large enterprise backup environments. 21% have an active-active remote replication strategy in place and 41% have an active-passive replication strategy. This result is noteworthy given that large enterprises have historically moved big data volumes by shipping physical tapes off site.
• DR still evolving: Despite the growing trend toward electronic replication, a significant number of big data protection environments (18%) are still making copies of physical tape and storing them off-site. 17% are still either working without a DR strategy or in the process of implementing one.
• Data protection for remote offices improving slowly. 15% of data in remote offices and 11% of data in main data centers are currently not backed up or protected. This indicates a significant improvement in data protection over the results reported in our 2011 survey, which indicated that more than one third of remote office data was unprotected.

"As the survey report reveals, enterprise data centers with big data backup environments face exponential data growth and massive data volumes," said Kevin Shea, SVP of engineering, Sepaton. "They need an efficient way to move data over a WAN for data protection of remote sites and for effective disaster protection for central data centers. While more and more are adopting electronic replication solutions, there is still a growing need for more efficient ways to move massive data volumes over a WAN and to manage backup, restore, replication, and DR from a holistic, enterprise-wide perspective."

To download the survey report (registration needed)