18 January 2011
Press release

Virtualisation and Cloud Pose Major Backup and Recovery Challenges to Businesses Around the World, Acronis Survey Warns

Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index ranking shows UK lagging behind when it comes to confidence levels in backup and disaster recovery

London, UK, January 18, 2011 - Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use backup and recovery solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today launched the industry's first Global Disaster Recovery Index, a barometer which measures IT managers' confidence in their backup and recovery operations.

The survey of over 3,000 small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) conducted by the Ponemon Institute revealed that while attitudes towards backup and recovery differ widely around the world, businesses everywhere want a single backup and recovery solution for physical, virtual and cloud environments.

The greatest challenge for the majority (67%) of UK IT managers is moving data between these three environments. The average UK business currently uses at least two to three separate backup solutions, with a third (35%) using four or more, to manage their different environments, further complicating disaster recovery (DR).

One of the biggest concerns is that over a third (36%) of businesses in the UK have no offsite backup and DR strategy in place. They cite lack of budget and resources as the primary reasons why it is not more of a priority. But this theory plays out only partially. As a proportion of all IT spend, the UK only spends slightly less (10%) on backup and DR than the Index leaders Germany (13%) and the Netherlands (14%).

The survey also highlighted that many UK IT managers are failing to back up their virtual environments as often as their physical counterparts. Despite an expected 25% increase in the deployment of virtual production servers in 2011, over two thirds of UK (71%) organisations claim they either do not back up, or do not know, if they back up their virtual servers as often as their physical servers. In addition, globally over half (56%) of companies surveyed worldwide are using different solutions for both their physical and virtual backups.

The Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index

To create the Index, each country was ranked based on its average responses from 11 questions about their confidence in backup and DR readiness, capabilities and practices. Topics covered were technology, resources, procedures and executive buy-in. Key findings include:

  • Very confident: Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland
    This group of countries has the best boardroom buy-in, controls, documented policies and procedures for their backup and DR operations. As a result they have the highest confidence that they can recover quickly in event of system downtime, 50% more confident than the average.
  • Confident: Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan
    This group has the best qualified staff in place to execute backup and DR operations in the wake of a serious incident. Surprisingly they are the most likely to use separate backup solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments (67%, 66% and 70% of organisations respectively).
  • The middle ground: Norway and Sweden
    Swedish and Norwegian businesses spend a lot more of their overall IT budget on backup and DR than any other country surveyed (16% and 17% respectively). However, they are the least likely to embrace cloud computing, citing a lack of trust as the key reason. While most countries will average an 87% increase in cloud-based IT over the next 12 months, the Swedish and Norwegian use of the cloud will grow little more than 20% during the same period.
  • The laggards: UK, Australia and the United States
    Businesses in the UK, Australia and the US all scored poorly on their confidence in their ability to avoid downtime in the event of a serious incident (27%/44%/38%). When it comes to successfully recovering from a serious incident the Australians were the least confident. Just 22% of Australian businesses felt that they would be able to recover quickly in the event of downtime, compared to a global average of 50%.
  • Room to grow: France and Italy
    These countries are the most likely to admit that they do not have a backup and DR strategy (41%/45%) and the least likely to be able to recover quickly from downtime. They spend the lowest percentage of overall IT budget of all countries surveyed at 5% and 4% respectively. Server virtualisation adoption rates are also among the lowest. However, French and Italian businesses expect to see their use of cloud grow by 23% and 350% respectively over the next 12 months.

Chart: Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index 2011

"It's not surprising that IT managers across the world differ so much with regards to their attitudes towards backup and DR", said David Blackman, General Manager of Northern Europe, Acronis. "However, it is clear that what SMBs are looking for, regardless of location, is one reliable, easy-to-use solution which spans physical, virtual and cloud platforms. By launching this Index, we hope businesses will benefit from comparing their backup practices against national and global benchmarks."

The survey was conducted by the Ponemon Group across 13 countries in October 2010. Over 3,000 IT practitioners were surveyed in small- to mid-market organisations with no more than 1,000 seats. Countries included: Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden, Norway, UK, USA, Italy and France. Details of how the index was calculated and where each country appears can be found here: http://tiny.cc/c9ogq




About Acronis:

Acronis is a global cyber protection company that provides natively integrated cybersecurity, data protection, and endpoint management for managed service providers (MSPs), small and medium businesses (SMBs), and enterprise IT departments. Acronis solutions are highly efficient and designed to identify, prevent, detect, respond, remediate, and recover from modern cyberthreats with minimal downtime, ensuring data integrity and business continuity. Acronis offers the most comprehensive security solution on the market for MSPs with its unique ability to meet the needs of diverse and distributed IT environments.

A Swiss company founded in Singapore in 2003, Acronis has 15 offices worldwide and employees in 50+ countries. Acronis Cyber Protect is available in 26 languages in 150 countries and is used by over 20,000 service providers to protect over 750,000 businesses. Learn more at www.acronis.com.
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