As World Backup Day reminds us to be vigilant about protecting our business and personal data, the reality of preparedness paints a very different picture. Arcserve, LLC, whose breakthrough data protection and availability solutions deliver enterprise power with small team simplicity, today released results from a new survey revealing that while the cost of downtime is the top IT concern, less than 15 percent of businesses have a high degree of confidence in recovering their data should downtime or a disaster event occur.

The Complexity Culprit
It's common knowledge that today's IT teams are asked to do more with less; interestingly however, survey respondents reported IT resources to be less of concern than costs associated with downtime, the complexity of managing on-premises, virtual and cloud data, and ransomware events. In fact, when asked to rank their top five data protection concerns, managing varied data and systems was reported to be the top concern, 37 percent more than insufficient personnel or budget.

With downtime on the rise and ransomware attacks set to hit a business every 14 seconds by the end of 2019, up from every 40 seconds this year, organizations must make 2018 the year to implement sound disaster recovery plans that will protect their data, and that of their customers. Based on new survey results, organizations understand the urgency of mitigating risk from downtime and ransomware attacks, but the key challenge in successful DR planning lies in the complexity of their varied infrastructures, and not necessarily the lack of IT resources.

"Some data protection vendors are now backing into support for cloud and physical systems with ‘uni-taskers' - solutions that were specifically designed for one environment," said Christophe Bertrand, VP of Product Marketing at Arcserve. "And, while organizations may have purchased these types of solutions with the hope of simplifying or reducing costs, they've actually created more complexity in the process with data becoming increasingly heterogeneous."

Data Protection Vendors: The Importance of a Brand Name
While the top IT concern was consistent across channel partners, service providers, and end-users, what they look for in a data protection vendor illustrates a different reality. Partners overwhelmingly ranked brand name, or market familiarity, as one of their top three criteria when evaluating a vendor. However, in contrast, end-users stated this to be the least important factor when purchasing a data protection solution.

According to end-user priorities, almost half - 45 percent - told us they consider ease of use and deployment as the number one purchasing criteria, followed by total price and integration with database applications. Seemingly, businesses are willing to pay more for a data protection solution that is easy to deploy and manage than one that is priced lower, but that may require more extensive training or specialization.

Health Insurance and Benefits Trumps Business Continuity for Some
The expectation of system availability is higher than ever before, with respondents categorizing 79 percent of their company data as mission or business-critical. But getting back online is just half of the battle, with more than a third of businesses reporting they could, at maximum, only withstand an hour of data loss. For nearly 20 percent of respondents, however, health insurance ranked of higher importance than 24/7 access to their company's mission-critical data. Other criteria included personal photos, mobile phones, and a two-week, fully-paid vacation.

Arcserve commissioned the survey to nearly 600 channel partners and IT decision makers across the Americas, Europe and Japan. Full survey results here.