NAKIVO Inc., the fastest-growing virtualization and cloud backup software company, today released the 2014 Annual VM Backup Report. NAKIVO 2014 Annual VM Backup Report provides insight in the current state of virtualization data protection worldwide. The data has been collected via a global survey of SMBs (companies with up to 250 employees or up to $100M in annual revenue) who are using VMware virtualization in their datacenters.

The report can be downloaded at: nakivo.com/2014-vm-backup-report.htm.

Key risks identified:

• Complete data loss: 1 in 4 SMBs keep all of their VM backups and replicas onsite, and thus run a high risk of losing all of their data in case of a disaster, storage failure, or backup repository corruption.
• Failed recoveries: Almost a third of companies do not verify their VM backups for recoverability and run a risk of not being able to recover data because VM backups are corrupted.
• Long disaster recovery times: 35% of businesses rely solely on VM backup, and thus run a risk of long recovery times in case of a disaster.
• High cost of a downtime: 41% of SMBs do not know the cost of their business-critical VMs being down, and can suffer significant revenue/customer loss if their Tier 1 VMs become unavailable.

• Keep at least one copy of business-critical VM backups offsite to ensure that VMs can be recovered in case of a disaster. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a single-click integration with Amazon cloud, providing a simple, reliable, and affordable offsite backup storage solution.
• Schedule VM backup verification. On average, 2/3 of SMBs had to recover VMs in the past 12 months, and 16% of those VM recoveries failed. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides built-in backup verification that can be run on schedule and ensure that files, application objects, and VMs can be recovered.
• Use VM replication for business-critical VMs. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a simple and intuitive way to create and maintain identical copies of source VMs (aka “replicas”) on a target site. In case of a disaster, the VM replicas can be simply powered on, providing near-instant disaster recovery.
• Identify business-critical VMs and assess downtime/data loss costs. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can help achieve high RPOs with frequent backup and replication job run schedules, and low RTOs with VM replicas and Flash VM Boot.