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:
https://promo.acronis.com/uk-dr-index-t1.html
About Acronis:
Acronis is a leader in AI-native cyber protection, unifying data protection, cybersecurity, IT operations and hybrid infrastructure to deliver business continuity, security and compliance with less cost and complexity. More than 21,000 service providers trust Acronis to protect over 750,000 businesses in 150 countries. Acronis is headquartered in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. For more information, visit www.acronis.com.