A Third of Industrial Firms Lack Confidence in Recovering Quickly From A Disaster, Reveals Acronis Survey

Majority claim to be under funded and under resourced when it comes to protecting data

London, UK, 24 March, 2011 - Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use backup and recovery solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today announced that the industrial sector, namely construction and manufacturing, lack confidence in their backup and disaster recovery strategies with nearly a third (30 percent) stating they would face substantial risk of downtime in the event of a serious incident or disaster.

The Acronis survey of over 3,000 small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), conducted by the Ponemon Institute, went on to reveal that over half (51 percent) of industrial organisations are failing to make disaster recovery (DR) a sufficient priority. Nearly two thirds (60 percent) of those surveyed cited lack of budget and IT resources as the main reason. This is supported further with half (51 percent) saying they spend less than five percent of their IT budget on DR, which is half the UK's national average (10 percent).

Many of the survey's other findings show that the UK's industrial sector is relatively slow to embrace new technologies. For example the adoption of virtualisation amongst the industrial sector mirrors the national UK average, with only a fifth (20 percent) of all production servers being virtualised. Similarly, nearly two thirds (61 percent) of industrial 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.

The similarities between the industrial sector and the rest of the UK continues with cloud adoption. Most industrial organisations predict that nearly a third (32 percent) of their IT infrastructure will be in the cloud by the end of the year. For IT managers speed of recovery, compliance and workload complexity are cited as the top three challenges facing cloud adoption. However, half of respondents (51 percent) agree that the cloud will enable lower operating costs.

Other key findings from the survey include:

• No comprehensive backup strategy: Over half (54 percent) of businesses in the industrial sector are only using file-based backups, which means their entire systems including operating systems and applications are not protected.
• Severely lacking offsite backup strategy: A third (36 percent) of industrial organisations have no offsite backup and DR strategy, leaving them wide open to risk in the event of natural disaster or theft. And half (50 percent) are still reliant on taking a disk or tape offsite at the end of each day.

David Blackman, general manager of Northern Europe, Acronis, explains: "All sectors are under pressure to keep businesses up and running, however, in this industry it is particularly prevalent. Manufacturing and construction cannot stop. For many companies any pause in production or building development will lead to thousands of pounds worth of losses."

"One finding that has been consistent throughout the research, and is no different for businesses in the industrial sector, is that two thirds (68 percent) stated that the most beneficial thing that could improve their backup and DR strategy would be a single solution capable of delivering physical, virtual and cloud protection. If these organisations can look to one method and tool to manage their backups across the three environments, IT managers roles will become easier and confidence levels in the industrial sector are sure to grow."

The survey was conducted by the Ponemon Institute in October 2010. Over 3,000 IT practitioners were surveyed in small- to mid-market organisations with no more than 1,000 seats across 13 countries. 334 work in industry. Details of how the index was calculated and where each country appears can be found here: http://promo.acronis.com/uk-dr-index-t1.html