Two-Thirds of Organizations Measure DR Time in Days, Not Hours – TwinStrata

TwinStrata, Inc. announced the results of its Industry Trends: Backup in 2014 survey.

Conducted between December 2013 and January 2014, the report analyzes responses from 209 IT personnel.
 
The results indicate an urgent need for organizations to make significant improvements to their backup strategies with one in five organizations experiencing backup failures at least monthly and one in 10 weekly. As a result, 53% of organizations plan to make changes to their backup strategy this year. Incorporating cloud storage was the remedy most often cited by these respondents.
 
Failures and DR
DR was the area where backup strategies were most under stress.

Specifically:

• Just 12% predict they can recover from a site disaster within a couple hours. Cloud storage users were twice as likely to recover in that timeframe (20%) as non-cloud storage users (9%).
• 63% of organizations measure site recovery time in days, with 29% requiring four days or more.
• More than half of organizations experience backup failure multiple times a year due to a host of issues from connectivity failure (25%), equipment failure (21%) or file corruption (18%).

Management and Maintenance
As organizations try to minimize the resource commitment required by their backup strategies, the survey found the results on management and maintenance standards alarming.

Specifically:

• 75% of respondents are backing up more data than they did last year, and 21% are backing up at least twice the data as last year. Only three% report backing up less data.
• A surprising 59% of organizations keep backups in only one location, typically a single, physical site.
• More than half spent six or more hours managing and maintaining their backups, and 14% spent more than 20 hours.
• Individual applications were at greatest risk, with nearly a quarter of organizations backing up applications less often than monthly and, in some cases never.

 
Nicos Vekiarides, CEO, TwinStrata, said: “Once again, we see in this survey organizations using the cloud as a means to address some of their standard storage problems such as backup have a significant advantage over those that don’t. That fact, coupled with the lower cost, lower maintenance model that cloud storage provides makes it an easy way for organizations to improve their ability to quickly recover.”

Full report (registration needed)