Two-Thirds of Organizations Measure DR Time in Days, Not
Hours
And 52% experience multiple backup failures per year
The results of
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.
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.
- 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
3% 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.