65% of Companies Using Cloud Storage for Remote Location DR

Acronis International GmbH announced sponsoring new research from IDC Corp. that identifies complexity and data growth as key data protection challenges for SMBs.

The findings show that more and more organizations are dealing with simultaneously needing to backup physical, virtual and cloud environments, reveal varying levels of cloud backup adoption across different geographies, and bring to light the cost of downtime for SMBs.

The findings are based on a worldwide, cross-industry survey of SMBs (< 1,000 employees) concerning their evolving data protection and DR needs. Respondents were from eight countries, including France, Germany, Russia, the UK, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the US.

Global findings include:

• International adoption in the cloud lags behind the US: While 93% of US SMBs backup some portion of their data to the cloud, this figure is just 65% globally. This includes 57% of SMBs in AsiaPac and 63% in Western Europe. Of the organizations not backing up to the cloud, companies in Western Europe and AsiaPac were far more likely to cite security as a concern than US companies. Specifically, 33% of respondents from the US cited security as the reason they are not backing up to the cloud, while 59% of Western European companies and 45% of AsiaPac countries noted the same concerns.
• Downtime is a killer: Nearly 80% of companies estimate downtime costs them at least $20,000 per hour or more, and more than 20% estimate it costs them at least $100,000.
• More organizations are facing backup complexity with heterogeneous environments: Almost 37% of organizations have to simultaneously backup virtual, physical and cloud-based servers. Of those that are managing virtual infrastructures, 54% have to manage two or more different hypervisors. Within these figures, the US (77.8%), UK (74.2%) and Singaporean (78.1%) IT infrastructures are far more complex than those of Germany (38.7%), France (48.3%) and Japan (45.5%).
• Very few organizations trust the cloud alone: 87% of organizations retain on-premise copies of their data.

“The findings released today are clear – it’s a different world for IT managers today, and backup for a SMB is more complex than ever,” said Eric Burgener, research director, storage, IDC. “Data sizes and types continue to evolve, as does the number of servers and OSs each company uses. This leads to a host of new challenges IT managers face to make sure they can backup and protect their data and restore operations quickly.”

“Data is more plentiful, complex, and valuable than ever before,” said Serguei Beloussov, CEO, Acronis. “That’s why we pioneered the Acronis AnyData Engine, so organizations of all sizes can easily protect their data and ensure their systems can be restored smoothly, quickly and completely. With downtime costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for some companies, every IT manager should make sure they have a plan in place to restore operations and avoid data loss.“

Survey respondents were all IT personnel with responsibility for purchase decisions and overall management, on the team that had responsibility for these areas, or that influenced purchase decisions in these areas.

To download the IDC white paper Complexity and Data Growth Driving Small and Medium Environments Toward A New Generation of Data Protection (registration needed)