Acronis Survey Reveals Disaster Recovery Failing To Catch Up With Virtualization, Cloud

Woburn, MA, 14 February 2012 - According to a new survey conducted by Acronis, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. are failing to adapt their disaster recovery operations to new virtualized and cloud-based IT environments. Although both virtualization and the cloud are on the rise, U.S. SMBs are relying on outdated technologies and methodologies to protect their data in the wake of a disaster.

The 2012 Acronis Disaster Recovery Index revealed that 89 percentof U.S. SMBs already have some portion of their IT infrastructure virtualized. In addition, U.S. SMBs predict that 31 percent of their servers will be virtualized by the end of the year.

However, businesses aren't protecting their virtualized infrastructure adequately, with only 41 percent backing up their virtual machines as often as their physical ones. Almost half (48 percent) only backup their virtual machines on a weekly or monthly basis.

Cloud adoption is on the rise as well, but isn't being implemented enough for backup and disaster recovery. Thirty-six percent of U.S. SMBs have more than half of their infrastructure in the cloud, but only 24 percent are using the cloud for backup and disaster recovery. In fact, 29 percent did not have an offsite backup and disaster recovery strategy at all.

"Clearly there is a disconnect between new models of infrastructure and the backup and disaster recovery methods that should accompany them," said Izzy Azeri, senior vice president and general manager at Acronis Americas. "Virtualized and cloud-based servers require the same degree of protection as physical ones. New technology and updated contingency planning are the keys to bringing disaster recovery up to speed with today's diversified infrastructures."

Businesses have high hopes for virtualization and the cloud. Forty percent of U.S. SMBs agreed that migrating to a virtualized and/or cloud-based environment would help ensure their backup and disaster recovery procedures run more smoothly. Additionally, 76 percent agree that the best way to improve backup and disaster recovery would be to have an integrated (physical, virtual, cloud) solution. It's clear that as the IT infrastructure landscape continues to grow in complexity, there is a rising demand for backup and disaster recovery solutions that can protect data from increasingly unpredictable threats.

Other interesting virtualization and cloud findings from the 2012 Acronis Disaster Recovery Index include:

The survey was conducted by the Ponemon Institute across 18 countries in September and October 2011. Over 6,000 IT practitioners were surveyed in small- to mid-market organisations with no more than 1,000 seats. The full survey and details of how the index was calculated and where each country appears can be found here: