Backup is Critical, but Incomplete – Axcient/Dimensional Research

Unscheduled downtime can have dramatic impacts on business results. Outages are detrimental to any business, regardless of its size. With increasingly complex and critical IT environments, SMBs are seeking ways to implement reliable backup and recovery solutions to protect their businesses. The cloud has emerged as a desirable alternative to traditional backup and DR. This survey investigates the current state of backup and DR with SMBs, with a focus on evaluating the impact of cloud backup solutions.

The following report, sponsored by Axcient, Inc., is based on a survey of 453 IT professionals conducted in the United States and Canada. All participants worked at companies with between 50 and 1000 employees. The goal of the survey was to capture data on current trends and experiences with IT backup and recovery among SMBs.

Key Findings

Backup is critical, but incomplete for most SMBs

• Unscheduled downtime has significant business implications
• 71% backup both data and applications
• Only 24% backup all data and all applications
• Only 27% of small companies backup all applications compared to 48% of mid-sized companies
• Only 43% backup laptops and desktops

Disasters do happen, and IT is held responsible for recovery failures

• 79% have had a major IT failure in the past two years
• Only 8% could recover from a major IT failure within a hour
• Only 7% were very confident that they could recover operations within 2 hours
• 96% say IT staff can be held personally responsible for recovery problems
• 69% report mid-level IT staff would be held responsible if there were a major recovery problem
• Only 14% of IT executives would blame admins for lost data, but 57% of admins think they would be held responsible
• 51% say someone could lose their job if critical data could not be recovered

Fragmented backup tools cause significant problems

• 90% of SMBs have multiple backup and recovery tools
• 61% have backup and recovery tools with duplicate functionality
• 91% report using multiple backup and recovery tools creates challenges
• 71% report using multiple backup and recovery tools can increase risk

Cloud recovery very desirable, although adoption is early

• 38% use cloud-based backup and recovery
• 89% see value in cloud-based DR
• Cloud backup and recovery users recover faster from failures than those with traditional solutions
• 79% of those with a non-cloud secondary DR site would make a change if they had resources

The State of IT Recovery survey found 91% of SMBs reported challenges with using multiple backup and recovery tools. It also found 67% of teams had to learn multiple solutions.

Survey Methodology
An independent database of IT professionals was invited to participate in a web survey by Dimensional Research on the topic of IT backup and recovery for SMBs. A total of 453 respondents across the United States and Canada who worked at companies with between 50 and 1,000 employees completed the survey. Each respondent had responsibility for backup and recovery of data and applications. Participants included IT executives, IT team managers, hands-on IT professionals, and consultants and represented a wide range of industry verticals.

To download the complete survey