Companies Have a False Sense of Confidence in Their Backup Solutions Reveals Databarracks' Survey
8th August 2008
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The latest results from the Databarracks annual
Backup and Recovery survey indicate that overall, 91% of companies
claim to be confident in their backup solution. Upon further
investigation, 74% of those who do not use encryption or
replication and do not take backups offsite are confident despite
skipping these steps. Furthermore, 67% still consider their backup
solution to be secure even though they do not keep or check backup
logs and do not test their restores to ensure that they are working
properly.
Peter Groucutt, Managing Director at Databarracks says
"the results of the survey so far show that although most companies
understand the importance of having business continuity and
disaster recovery plans in place, there seems to be a knowledge gap
when it comes to understanding the technologies that are currently
available to deliver reliable and fast recovery in the event of a
system failure. These days it is not enough to blindly trust that
backups are being completed properly. Businesses and the regulatory
environment in which we all exist demand fast and reliable recovery
time objectives for IT systems. Such is the pace at which a modern
company transacts business these days that those who are without
their IT for any great length of time are losing serious money.
Customers are also becoming a lot more aware of the information
that companies hold and are getting less and less forgiving about
delivery disruption, let alone the thought of their sensitive data
being transported in a an unencrypted and readable
format."
The survey also reveals that 27% of companies' data loss
is caused by human error, 26% from hardware failure, and 19% from
software failure. Previous reports from 2006 indicated that
hardware failure caused the majority of data loss at 61%, while
human error only accounted for 2%.
"This change in causes of data loss can possibly be
attributed to improvements in software and hardware resiliency in
the last two years which has reduced the number of hardware and
software failures affecting computers, changing the way these
threats need to be addressed in business continuity and disaster
recovery plans moving forward," speculates Oscar Arean,
Databarracks' Technical Support Manager.
The Data Health Check Survey is the largest and most
comprehensive survey in the industry focused purely on backup and
recovery technologies and practices. So far, it has been answered
by 500 companies with strong representation across all industry
sectors including Banking and Finance, IT, Education, and
Engineering. The data gathered spans a variety of topics including
virtualisation, business continuity plans, restores, backup
policies, data retention regulations, and other associated
areas.
The survey will remain open for participation on an ongoing
basis and interim reports will be released throughout the year with
a detailed breakdown of the results published annually. The first
annual report will be published in February 2009. Companies who
participate in the survey have their answers compiled into a
personalised report where their responses are benchmarked against
all respondents within the same particular industry, then compared
to the overall results. All results are anonymous and benchmarking
reports are emailed automatically once the survey has been
completed. Anyone interested in participating in the Data Health
Check or viewing a sample report can do so online by
visiting www.databarracks.com/datahealthcheck
.