Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today released results from its sixth annual disaster recovery survey which found that of the enterprises surveyed, only 56 per cent regularly back up data on virtual systems.
The survey, sponsored by Symantec was conducted by Applied Research, included responses from 1700 large enterprises around the world with 5000 employees or more, including Canada.
Peter Elliman, senior manager for product marketing, NetBackup at Symantec, said the survey results show only 20 per cent of virtual environments containing mission-critical data are being protected by replication or failover technologies. With more enterprises moving towards virtual environments, Elliman said they’re re-evaluating their disaster recovery plans.
“Eighty-four per cent of enterprises said they re-evaluated their disaster recovery plans this year as a result of virtualization,” he said. “That’s up from the 64 per cent that we saw one year ago.”
When it comes to backing up virtual machines, 59 per cent of enterprises said they’re constrained by factors such as people, budget and space.
With cloud computing, 66 per cent or enterprises said security is their main concern, while 55 per cent said their biggest challenge of the cloud is control.
One of the biggest improvements this year was the frequency of disaster recovery testing, Elliman said.
“Last year only 66 per cent of businesses tested their disaster recovery tests more than once a year,” he said. “This year, 82 per cent said they test more frequently than once a year.”
Some of the reasons for not testing included budget (60 per cent), disruption to employees (59 per cent) and disruption to customers, sales and revenue stream (24 per cent). This year, respondents said 26 per cent of their total annual IT budget goes toward disaster recovery-related initiatives, showing a slight decrease from 30 per cent last year.
“Mission critical data and applications should be treated the same,” Elliman said. “Just because something’s being moved into a virtual or cloud environment doesn’t mean you give it less attention. On the backup side, there are some low-end backup methods like de-duplication and continuous data protection. It’s all about priorities, planning and tools.”
The opportunity for channel partners is to educate their customers about how various technologies and solutions can resolve their security needs and resource constraints, Elliman added.
While Elliman didn’t have any SMB-specific data regarding disaster recovery, he said just like small companies, large enterprises face the same backup and security challenges too, just on a different scale.
“Enterprises may have bigger budgets, but they’ll also often have more people and offices,” he said. “Enterprises will have to do the same prioritization that SMBs do in terms of figuring out which processes and security initiatives to pursue. This is the value that resellers can bring to customers.”
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