Data Backup Digest

Unitrends have published concerning results from a survey they conducted that aimed to look at the challenges IT departments tackle when trying to protect data from downtime and disaster. They polled over 400 respondents, from organisations and industries of all shape and size.

Their results found that, in the last year, around 30 percent of organisations had lost data due to a data centre outage, with 42 percent saying they had experienced some downtime. Those results are surprising. Redundancy is a key word when it comes to data storage. The idea is that you have enough copies of your data, enough protection, that you can’t lose data or suffer an outage because there’s always a backup ready to go.

More than half of the respondents said that they had to recover from the cloud within the last year, while one in ten had to recover from the cloud five or more times. That’s a lot of recovery on a figure that should be zero.

It’s perhaps most troubling that more than half of the respondents said that they only tested their data recovery abilities once a year or less. A data disaster can happen at any point – you won’t expect it, but you should be prepared for it. If you are only testing your recovery ability once in a year, you are not prepared.

“It is concerning that most enterprises don’t really know for sure if they can recover their applications after a downtime event as they test rarely or not at all. The need to continuously test recovery tools is critical to ensuring speedy business restoration,” said Joe Noonan, vice president of product management at Unitrends.

In more positive news, the survey shows that more are integrating the cloud in their data protection strategy. This links back to redundancy – part of your backup strategy should be off-site, to prevent against things like physical disaster wiping out your primary and backup data. Cloud has become an easy and affordable solution for many, with lots of medium to large businesses employing bigger cloud services like AWS.

The survey found that roughly 60 percent of organisations use the cloud as part of their data protection strategy. Many are using it for archiving or long-term retention, followed by DraaS and business continuity, along with short-term file storage.

Of the 40 percent of organisations not currently using the cloud, 53 percent said they planned to begin doing so within the next year. If that’s the case, 80 percent of organisations will be using the cloud for data protection by 2020.

If the respondents from this survey can be applied broadly, it’s clear that the cloud continues to grow in popularity. However, many organisations still don’t have proper control over their data or their recovery plans. Though it can be hard for some IT crews to get the funding they need to support their operations, businesses need to start investing the money now to ensure they don’t lose it down the line when their data goes kaput.