Backup is Critical, but Incomplete
- Survey of IT recovery for SMBs
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 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