IDC: Data Growth and Complexity Are Key Challenges Facing SMB IT Departments

The twin pressures of increasing data volume and complexity are the primary data protection challenges for small- and medium-sized IT departments today, according to new research from IDC and Acronis. With more and more data to protect, on more devices and in physical, cloud, virtual and mobile environments, data protection is more challenging than ever.

The IDC research, "Complexity and Data Growth Driving Small and Medium-Sized Environments Toward a New Generation of Data Protection," sponsored by Acronis, surveyed IT professionals worldwide about how they protect modern data, how they measure the cost of downtime and where yesterday’s technologies fall short. The survey finds that the pressures of more data volume and complexity are causing IT professionals to adopt next generation data protection solutions that are easy to use and that protect all data, whether it lives on physical servers, virtual machines, in the cloud or on a mobile device. Highlights from the IDC survey include:

• Rising backup complexity: More than one-third (37 percent) of companies today must simultaneously back up virtual, physical and cloud-based servers.
• Multi-hypervisor reality: Of companies that manage virtual infrastructures, more than half (54 percent) manage two or more different hypervisors.
• Downtime is costly — and getting more so: Nearly 80 percent of respondents estimate that downtime costs their business at least $20,000 per hour, while more than 20 percent estimate it costs at least $100,000.
• Need to meet strict RTOs: 87 percent of companies retain their most recent cloud-based backup on-premises as well.

“The findings released today are clear — it’s a different world for IT managers today, and data backup for a small or medium-sized business is more complex than ever,” says Eric Burgener, Research Director, Storage at IDC, in a release. “Data sizes and types continue to evolve, as does the number of servers and operating systems each company uses. This leads to a host of new challenges IT managers face to make sure they can back up and protect their data and restore operations quickly.”

To view the full results, download a free copy of the release here

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