CIO Survey Reveals Weaknesses in Virtualization Data Protection

Veeam Software, Inc. announced the results of its annual Virtualization Data Protection Report.

This report is Veeam’s third study into the impact of virtualization on data protection, backup and recovery strategies. The independent survey of 500 CIOs across the USA and Europe found that enterprises are still not experiencing the full benefits that virtualization brings to data protection, with capabilities, complexity and cost all affecting implementations. Indeed, in a number of areas enterprises’ data protection capabilities have actually diminished since the last report in late 2011.
 
Key findings:

• 68% of CIOs feel that their backup and recovery tools will become less effective as the amount of data and servers in their organization grows.
• Recovery of virtual servers is only a little faster than that of physical servers, at 5 and 6 hours respectively. This is actually worse than in 2011, when recovery took 4 and 5 hours.
• Every hour of downtime costs an enterprise $324,793: meaning that downtime is, on average, costing organizations at least $1.6 million per incident.
• Recovering individual files and application items can take even longer: for example, recovering individual emails takes on average 14 hours.
• Regardless of recovery times, enterprises experience problems with more than 1 in 6 recoveries.
• 88% of CIOs experience capability-related challenges with backup and recovery, 84% with complexity and 87% with cost: showing that data protection is still not a simple task.
• 58% of CIOs are planning to change their backup tool for virtual environments by 2014.

"At first glance, the fears of CIOs look to be correct: despite the potential for faster, more efficient data protection that virtualization offers and the advances modern data protection tools can provide, recovery times have increased since 2011," said Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO of Veeam. "This apparent loss of momentum in data protection comes down to two influences. First, virtual infrastructure is constantly growing: as well as forming the majority of IT infrastructure now, it will continue to grow in the future. Second, organizations are not updating their data protection tools and strategies to match. For example, the majority of enterprises still deploy agents for backup and recovery. This approach works for physical environments but is unnecessary and ill-suited to the virtual infrastructure. Until organizations stop using a physical-world mind-set to view the technology, they will never be able to unlock its full potential."
 
Currently, virtual infrastructure accounts for 51% of enterprise servers, with this expected to grow to 63% in 2014. CIOs are not blind to the data protection issues these growing virtual infrastructures present. 88% of CIOs identified capability challenges affecting their ability to backup and recover virtual servers, while 84% recognized complexity challenges and 87% cost issues. Similarly, 77% of those enterprises using agent-based backup tools were experiencing problems or management issues with the technology. These included excessively complex management (43%), backups failing too often (32%), restores failing too often (28%), the cost of the technology (20%) and agents slowing the performance of servers (18%).

One sign that enterprises are beginning to recognize this is that 58% are planning to change the backup tool used for virtual servers by 2014. The primary driver for this is financial, with 51% changing due to TCO and 42% due to current hardware and software costs. Complexity is a reason to change for 47%, while failure to meet RTOs (32%) and Recovery Point Objectives (24%) are also factors.
 
About the survey:
Vanson Bourne, an independent market research organization, conducted an online survey in November and December 2012 of 500 CIOs from organizations across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France that employ more than 1,000 people.

To download the full report (registration needed)