New Research Finds That 65% of Companies Are Using Cloud-Based Storage for Remote Location Disaster Recovery

Survey Highlights the Need to Tame the Increasing Complexity of Data Protection, Cost of Downtime

Woburn, MA - July 9, 2014 - 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, 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%).
• Need to meet strict RTOs: 87 percent of companies retain their most recent cloud-based backup on-premises as well.

"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 Serg Bell, 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 the Acronis site.