Axcient Survey Finds Organizations Lack Confidence in Current BDR Setups

Most organizations believe having effective backup solutions in place is critical, but most still doubt the effectiveness of their current setup, according to a new study commissioned by Axcient.

The October survey, conducted by Dimension Data for Axcient, found that many of the 450 U.S. IT professionals surveyed continue to harbor doubts as to the effectiveness of the backup and recovery solutions being used to protect their sensitive company information.

The fear that solutions cannot deliver a comprehensive backup and recovery plan has led about 90 percent of IT professionals to use multiple tools to ensure data security, even though many of these tools have duplicate functionalities, according to Axcient. Ninety-one percent of those with multiple solutions report that this practice often causes confusion.

Most of those surveyed said they didn’t back up their data to the cloud today, but nine out of ten respondents said they see the value in cloud-based backup and disaster recovery, according to the study.

“Every year, businesses lose more than $40 billion due to application downtime and permanent data loss. This research gives a sense of why,” said Justin Moore, CEO of Axcient, in a statement. “With multiple, disparate, legacy tools for backup and recovery, current solutions are broken. As a result, users are unable to recover their systems in the event of an IT outage, or even worse, a disaster. It’s no surprise that IT is starting to recognize the value of the cloud.”

IT professionals also worry about the impact of major IT failures. Only 7 percent of respondents reported they are confident that they could recover their operations within two hours. About 53 percent said recovery time would be faster if they used a cloud-based solution. Respondents said benefits of switching to the cloud for backup included the ability to fully recover their resources, reduce overall cost and gain immediate access to applications and data in the event of a disaster.

The following are some of the other findings of the report, straight from the press release:

Backup is critical, but incomplete for most organizations

• Applications matter: mid-size companies are backing data and critical applications, too
• Backup has moved beyond just mission-critical, but there are still gaps

Major business interruptions do happen, and IT is held responsible

• Major IT failures are a fact of life, especially for small companies
• Recovery is very disruptive to the IT team
• Mid-level IT staff are held responsible for lost data
• 50 percent say someone could lose their job if data is lost

Fragmented backup tools cause significant problems

• More than half of companies surveyed use different tools to back up physical and virtual servers
• Multiple tools are needed to support all-environment backup
• 71 percent of those surveyed report that using multiple backup tools can increase risk

Cloud recovery is very desirable, and still a growing market

• One-third use cloud-based backup and recovery
• 89 percent see value in cloud-based disaster recovery
• 74 percent use a non-cloud based secondary site for recovery
• 79 percent of those with a non-cloud secondary site would make a change if they had resources