Today, Acronis,
the global leader in new generation data protection, announced
sponsoring new research from IDC that identifies complexity and data
growth as key data protection challenges for small- and medium-sized
businesses. The findings show that more and more organizations are
dealing with simultaneously needing to back up physical, virtual, and
cloud environments, and 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 small
and medium businesses (< 1,000 employees) concerning their evolving
data protection and disaster recovery 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 percent of US SMBs back up some portion of their data to
the cloud, this figure is just 65 percent globally. This includes 57
percent of SMBs in Asia Pacific and 63 percent in Western Europe. Of the
organizations not backing up to the cloud, companies in Western Europe
and Asia Pacific were far more likely to cite security as a concern than
US companies. Specifically, 33 percent of respondents from the US cited
security as the reason they are not backing up to the cloud, while 59
percent of Western European companies and 45 percent of Asia Pacific
countries noted the same concerns.
- Downtime is a killer: Nearly 80 percent of companies estimate
downtime costs them at least $20,000 per hour or more, and more than 20
percent estimate it costs them at least $100,000.
- More organizations are facing backup complexity with heterogeneous
environments: Almost 37 percent of organizations have to simultaneously
back up virtual, physical and cloud-based servers. Of those that are
managing virtual infrastructures, 54 percent 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 percent 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 data backup for a small or medium-sized business
is more complex than ever," said Eric Burgener, Research Director,
Storage at IDC. "Data sizes and types continue to evolve, as does the
number of servers and operating systems each company uses. This leads to
a host of new challenges IT managers face to make sure they can back up
and protect their data and restore operations quickly."
"Data is more plentiful, complex, and valuable than ever before,"
said Serguei Beloussov, CEO at 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, sponsored by Acronis, "Complexity
and Data Growth Driving Small and Medium Environments Toward A New
Generation of Data Protection," please visit http://promo.acronis.com/IDC-Disaster-Recovery-2014-WP.html.