Virtualisation and Cloud Pose Major Backup and Recovery Challenges to Businesses around the World, Acronis Survey Warns

Acronis launches Global Disaster Recovery Index ranking IT managers' confidence levels in backup and disaster recovery

Singapore, 18^th January 2011 - Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use backup and recovery solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today launched the industry's first Global Disaster Recovery Index, a barometer which measures IT managers' confidence in their backup and recovery operations.

The survey of over 3,000 small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) conducted by the Ponemon Institute revealed that while attitudes towards backup and recovery differ widely around the world, businesses everywhere want a single backup and recovery solution for physical, virtual and cloud environments. The vast majority (68%) of IT managers agree that their greatest challenge in a hybrid environment is moving data between the three environments, yet the average business currently uses at least two or three separate backup solutions making disaster recovery (DR) more complicated.

The survey also highlighted that many IT managers are failing to back up their virtual environments as often as their physical counterparts. Despite an expected 50% global increase in deployment of virtual production servers in 2011, over half (55%) of organisations claim they either do not back up, or do not know if they back up, their virtual servers as often as their physical servers. In addition, over half (56%) of companies are using different solutions for both their physical and virtual backups.

The Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index

To create the Index, each country was ranked based on its average responses from 11 questions about their confidence in backup and DR readiness, capabilities and practices. Questions covered technology, resources, procedures and executive buy-in. Key findings include:

• Very confident: Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland
  This group of countries has the best boardroom buy-in, controls, documented policies and procedures for their backup and DR operations. As a result they have the highest confidence that they can recover quickly in event of system downtime, 50% more confident than the average.
• Confident: Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan
  This group has the best qualified staff in place to execute backup and DR operations in the wake of a serious incident. Surprisingly they are the most likely to use separate backup solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments (67%, 66% and 70% of organisations respectively).
• The middle ground: Norway and Sweden
  Swedish and Norwegian businesses spend a lot more of their overall IT budget on backup and DR than any other country surveyed (16% and 17% respectively). However, they are the least likely to embrace cloud computing, citing a lack of trust as the key reason. While most countries will average an 87% increase in cloud-based IT over the next 12 months, the Swedish and Norwegian use of the cloud will grow little more than 20% during the same period.
• The laggards: UK, Australia and the United States
  Businesses in the UK, Australia and the US all scored poorly on their confidence in their ability to avoid downtime in the event of a serious incident (27%/44%/38%). When it comes to successfully recovering from a serious incident the Australians were the least confident. Just 22% of Australian businesses felt that they would be able to recover quickly in the event of downtime, compared to a global average of 50%.
• Room to grow: France and Italy
  These countries are the most likely to admit that they do not have a backup and DR strategy (41%/45%) and the least likely to be able to recover quickly from downtime. They spend the lowest percentage of overall IT budget of all countries surveyed at 5% and 4% respectively. Server virtualisation adoption rates are also among the lowest. However, French and Italian businesses expect to see their use of cloud grow by 23% and 350% respectively over the next 12 months.

Chart: Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index 2011

"It's not surprising that IT managers across the world differ so much with regards to their attitudes towards backup and DR," said Jason Donahue, CEO of Acronis."However, it is clear that what SMBs are looking for, regardless of location, is one reliable, easy-to-use solution which spans physical, virtual and cloud platforms. By launching this Index, we hope businesses will benefit from comparing their backup practices against national and global benchmarks."

The survey was conducted by the Ponemon Institute across 13 countries in October 2010. Over 3,000 IT practitioners were surveyed in small- to mid-market organisations with no more than 1,000 seats (no more than 500 seats in Asia Pacific). Details of how the index was calculated and where each country appears can be found here: http://promo.acronis.com/sg-dr-index-t1.html.