According to the 2012 Acronis Disaster Recovery Index,
small and medium sized businesses (organizations of under 100 seats) in
the U.S. public services sector are the most confident when it comes to
backup and disaster recovery operations. Thirty-four percent expressed
that they are most confident their IT and security personnel are
qualified to execute backup and disaster recovery operations in the wake
of a serious incident or event. Fifty-two percent strongly agreed that
their organizations have ample controls and procedures enabling them to
have comprehensive backup and disaster recovery operations. A clear
indicator of their high confidence stems from their high involvement in
their organizations backup and disaster recovery operations. Forty-two
percent of respondents cited that their backup and disaster recovery
plans are well documented as well.
SMBs in the public sector cite that
within the past year the amount of time lost in the event of system
downtime was less than half a day. Although system downtime for the
public sector was calculated as less than a day, thirty percent believe
their organization would not suffer substantial downtime due to a
serious incident. Twenty-five percent are also not very concerned with
their backups and disaster recovery operations failing in the event of a
serious incident due to their procedures and IT personnel currently in
place. The public sector is extremely confident in their ability to
quickly recover in the event of a disaster since twenty-seven percent
expressed high confidence overall in their organization’s ability to
quickly recover in the event of a system downtime.
Although the public sector is extremely
confident in their backup and disaster recovery procedures, only 5-10%
of their IT budget is spent specifically on backup and disaster recovery
operations. Even with a small portion of the IT budget, SMBs in the
public sector have implemented full-scale business continuity plans,
implementing more staff training and continue to test their backups more
regularly as a result of the natural disasters that occurred throughout
2011.
In the U.S the public services sector
was extremely confident in their backup and disaster recovery
operations; however the survey showed that the public services sectors
worldwide were not confident at all in these specific operations.
According to our worldwide overall results, the public services sector
was the least confident citing that lack of budget and resources as two
key challenges for backup and disaster recovery operations. Thirty-three
percent cited that they do not have a budget to IT spending, at all.
And forty-one percent cited that the lack of skilled IT personnel to
manage their backup and disaster recovery operations was another major
issue.
For more information on the 2012 Global Disaster Recovery Index:
The survey was conducted by the Ponemon Institute across 18 countries in September and October 2011.
Over 6,000 IT practitioners were surveyed in small- to mid-market
organizations with no more than 1,000 seats. Details of how the index
was calculated and where each country appears can be found here: