The survey of 500 SMBs across the USA and Europe found that they are
experiencing significant issues with the cost, complexity and lack of
capabilities of their data protection for virtual environments.
In
particular, 85% of SMBs are experiencing cost-related challenges with
backup and recovery, 83% with lack of capabilities and 80% with
complexity. This means there is a maximum of 15% of SMBs that currently
have no issues with data protection.
Other key findings were:
- Recovery of SMBs' virtual servers is only a little faster than
physical servers, at 4 hours 21 minutes and 4 hours 51 minutes
respectively.
- Recovery of individual files such as emails, takes up to 12 hours 8
minutes. This may be because 62% of SMBs often have to recover more
than needed to retrieve a single file or application item.
- 67% of SMBs' backup tools use agents, which can add to complexity:
76% of those SMBs encounter problems such as difficulty managing agents,
slow performance and both backup and recovery failing too often.
- 63% of SMBs believe their backup and recovery tools will become
less effective as the amount of data and servers in their organization
grows.
- 41% of SMBs stated that downtime in the event of an IT failure
costs $150,000 or more per hour: meaning that outages can cost these
organizations $600,000 or more based on the recovery times given.
- More than 1 in 6 (17%) recoveries of backed-up machines cause SMBs
problems, increasing recovery times and the cost of downtime. This is
not surprising considering only 8% are tested.
- Currently, an average of 33% of SMBs' virtual infrastructure is not backed-up.
- 55% of SMBs are planning to change their backup tool for virtual servers by 2014.
85% of SMBs identified cost-related challenges with their backup and
recovery of virtual environments, including: high ongoing management
costs (51%), expensive licensing models (48%) and backups either
requiring or using too much storage (44%).
83% reported capability-based challenges, including: backups taking too
long (40%), recovery taking too long (34%, suggesting that the majority
are happy with 4 hours' recovery time), difficulty recovering virtual
servers (25%) and file- and application-level recovery being too
difficult (22%).
Capacity-Related Challenges
Lastly, 80% of SMBs are facing complexity-related challenges with their
data protection, including: backups needing ongoing management (52%),
too many virtual servers to backup (35%) and backup tools being
difficult to configure and use (32%).
At the same time, SMBs are looking to solve these issues. 55% are
planning to change their backup tool for virtual serves in this period,
with the average time to change being only 10 months. The reasons given
to replace their current tools include TCO (46%), complexity (44%), and
lack of capabilities such as failure to meet RTOs (30%) and RPOs (21%).
This is in tandem with a growth in virtualization. While they currently
form 52% of the IT infrastructure, virtual servers are expected to form
63% within 2 years. This may also increase the amount of servers that
are protected. Currently, 67% of the virtual environment is backed-up,
meaning that almost a third of SMBs' virtual infrastructure is
unprotected.
About the survey:
Vanson Bourne Ltd., an
independent market research organization, conducted an online survey in
November and December 2012 of 500 SMBs across the United States, United
Kingdom, Germany, and France that employ between 250 and 1,000 people.
