Data Backup Digest

There’s no doubt about it: the cloud becomes more and more prominent by the day. The cloud is a popular choice for individuals and enterprises alike. It has many different benefits that cater to the needs of these audiences: access to files wherever you are, collaborative work and a backup of your files are but some of the advantages that using a cloud system offers. And now a latest piece of research, funded by technology giant Microsoft (and owner of cloud storage service OneDrive), has shown that the cloud certainly has grown.

Microsoft funded a study to be conducted by Forrestor. The study aimed to find out how organisations set up their disaster recovery infrastructure. Out of all the respondents, all enterprises, 15% of them used cloud database backups in their disaster recovery plans. Although this doesn’t seem like much, it is a figure that has doubled over the previous year.

Noel Yuhanna, a principal analyst at Forrester, announced the findings through a webinar that he held. The webinar, entitled “Database Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Gain Momentum: Are You Ready?” was streamed live and it is expected that an archive stream will be put online soon.

There were 209 respondents to the study that took place in North America. It is expected that this growth in cloud systems is only going to grow in the coming months and years. In his webinar, Yuhanna stated that 90% of the data currently on the internet was created within the last two years. That might seem incredible to think about, but when broken down it is obvious why. Not only is data increasing in individual size, but the growing of cloud services means that more data is being uploaded to the web.

The study also found that 70% of respondents had over 2TB of data that they needed to backup, highlighting the need for cloud services to have vast amounts of storage space available to suit these organisation’s needs. Plus, with the amount of storage being put online and existing within organisations, this is a figure that is sure to grow constantly. Data grows larger and cloud firms need to ensure they keep up and maintain a profitable business model to support these capacity requirements.

However, although cloud storage is growing in popularity, there is still some concern to adopt the online storage method. 78% of respondents said that they fear using cloud services and are unwilling to use them due to security concerns. Indeed, with the ongoing NSA revelations that were blown public by Edward Snowden, it’s clear that businesses are right to be concerned. Can their data really be trusted in the cloud, no matter how safe these services claim to be?

Whatever the case, it certainly wouldn’t be surprising to see those 15% of respondents using cloud services to grow substantially this time next year. However, cloud services should put an extremely heavy emphasis on the security that their services offer, especially considering that this is the majority reason that respondents are unwilling to use the cloud.