Hybrid Future For Data Protection Predicted

Vision Solutions, Inc. has released its State of Resilience Report for 2012 based on surveys of over 530 IT professionals WW representing more than 30 countries.

The most important result was that 47% of respondents plan to use a hybrid strategy based on combining storage, software and cloud based technologies to protect their critical IT infrastructures and applications, compared to around 13% each that said they would use one of those technologies alone for their recovery and continuity.

Alongside this, the report findings include an overview of the increasing pressure to deliver 24/7 access and the acceptance of virtualisation as a core component of resilience in the IT environment.

Key Findings:

• Use of cloud for data protection is increasing. The number of respondents choosing only cloud for their data protection strategy was equal to the number choosing only hardware and only software solutions for future data protection plans.
• Increase in adoption of agile data protection technologies alongside traditional tape option. Although tape still dominates DR planning overall, there was a slight decrease of 4% on last year’s figures when it comes to use of tape technologies. There has been an increase in use of storage-based replication, software or logical replication plus failover, and clustering. The largest percentage increase was in the use of software or logical replication and failover in comparison to last year.
• Server virtualisation has continued to grow with high rates of deployment across all sizes of company, demonstrating a maturity and acceptance of virtual servers. 87% of respondents have deployed virtual servers compared to 80% in the 2011 report. The take-up of virtualisation remains lowest in the SMB category, yet virtualisation has still been deployed by 80% of organisations with 1-10 employees according to the survey.
• Maturity of virtualisation further reinforced by high reported use of virtual servers as part of HA/DR strategy. Of those respondents that have virtualised, 70% use virtual servers as recovery systems within their HA/DR configuration.
• HA is key to delivering on 24/7 access requirements. The majority of respondents have business directives to enable 24/7 data and application access to users. IT professionals therefore see HA solutions as critical to delivering on this business requirement. The need for real-time protection of company data is being driven by this approach.

The fifth annual State of Resilience provides analysis of new and existing technologies that IT professionals are employing to protect their critical information and ensure business continuity. This year’s report addresses the role that cloud has in data protection strategies, future plans for BC and the increasing importance of HA solutions.

Alan Arnold, CTO, Vision Solutions, said: "Against a backdrop of natural disasters that had serious personal and business ramifications, as well as a range of high profile IT failures, the theme of resilience has been in the public eye more than usual. While the majority of companies have a DR strategy for IT, this year’s report emphasises that for most organisations, a traditional strategy is no longer adequate. Business demand for 24/7 access to data and applications drives the need for HA and DR solutions and we expect this trend to continue as globalisation and around-the-clock access pervade. As each and every IT transaction becomes critical, the need for real-time protection increases, regardless of the platform on which the application itself is running." 

To read the Fifth Annual State of Resilience Report (registration needed)