Cloud DR Adoption Rapidly Increasing Among SMBs, Study Shows
Cloud disaster recovery (DR) adoption is rapidly increasing among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), according to a new study of more than 300 IT professionals conducted by Zetta.net.
The cloud backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution provider’s “2016 SMB Recovery Readiness Study,” released this week, indicated 37 percent of SMBs currently are using the cloud as part of their DR solution, up from 26 percent last year.
Also, the study revealed that among SMBs that plan to add a new DR method in the next 12 months, 57 percent said they intend to leverage a cloud-based solution.
“The cloud is transforming disaster recovery and business continuity strategies like never before,” Zetta CEO Mike Grossman said in a prepared statement. “New technology that dramatically increases the speed of recovery, while keeping costs low and reliability high, is making the cloud a very attractive option for SMBs that need to assure disaster recoverability in the same ways as their large competitors.”
Other study results included:
- 84 percent of IT professionals said that several days of IT downtime would result in moderate to catastrophic costs and losses.
- 53 percent noted they rely on more than one DR method to “hedge their bets” to ensure recoverability.
- 33 percent said they rarely test their DR plan.
- 13 percent admitted their organization does not have a technical DR strategy in place.
“SMBs have made increasing investments into their virtual infrastructure to save on costs and resources, yet DR strategies to protect those virtualized workloads are still falling behind in comparison,” Grossman noted. “The cloud is delivering impressive new options for these organizations … As a result, organizations are able to efficiently assure disaster preparedness to avoid the increasing fear of a catastrophic loss.”
Cloud services providers (CSPs) should expect demand for cloud BDR services to increase over the next few years.
A recent report from technology market research firm Technavio indicated the global cloud BDR market could expand at a 12.94 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2016 and 2020.
“Cloud backup and recovery solutions securely copy the files to many servers. These solutions are safe from hard drive failures that are common with PCs. The files are also encrypted so that no one other than the user can view them, protecting the data from viruses and hackers,” Technavio said in a prepared statement. “As well, cloud backup and recovery solutions allow fast and easy access to all backed-up files.”
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