UK businesses’ storage footprint to grow exponentially over the next year
8th April 2009
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London, 8th of April 2009 -
Databarracks' latest survey results show that 87% of UK companies
expect some storage growth within the next 12 months with more than
half of these companies expecting to store up to 50% more data than
the amount stored in the previous year.
The annual Data Health Check survey completed by more than 1,000
companies of all sizes and across all sectors provides a
comprehensive overview of data backup and recovery technologies and
practices. The survey highlights trends in data backup, IT business
continuity and IT Disaster Recovery technologies and their
usage.
"In the current economic climate the tendency is to cut
expenditure wherever possible. Despite the global downturn, it
appears that companies are still expecting to see fairly sharp
increases in the amount of data that they need to protect, this is
set to remain fairly difficult with the rate of data growth and
data centres struggling with capacity" says Peter Groucutt,
Databarracks' Managing Director. "Another interesting area that the
survey has highlighted is the growing interest in virtualisation as
a cheaper way of ensuring that IT Disaster Recovery costs remain
manageable. Our own internal research shows that nearly 70% of IT
Managers want to have conversations about virtualisation and most
of those are interested in Virtual Disaster Recovery as an
alternative way of looking after key servers and applications in
their networks."
The latest IDC report has found that nearly 300Exabytes (300
Billion Gigabytes) of information is created globally during the
course of a year; and while production of digital information is
set to continue to increase exponentially, and new technologies
such as de-duplication help massively with storage of information,
the survey has shown that the majority of companies still rely on
old technologies such as tapes to protect their data (32%). In
other areas new technologies such as virtual environments have had
better take up are currently being used by 33% of respondents,
though only 38% of these used them in production environments.
Even with all the advancements in data storage solutions,
backups still take companies a considerable amount of time each
day: 12% of the companies surveyed have at least one dedicated
member of staff managing their backup solution, while 43% of the
respondents had to restore data at least once a month and 10% of
the participants needed to restore data from backups daily.
Alarmingly in the past year 39% of companies said they were unable
to recover backed up data due to restore failures and a further 25%
of companies surveyed cannot measure the efficiency of their backup
systems as they have never run restoration tests on stored
data.
There also looks to be clear advancement in hardware technology;
two years ago the figure for data loss because of hardware failure
stood at some 61% and this has dropped significantly to 24%
according to the companies which were surveyed this year. This was
replaced this year by 'Human Error' as the highest cause of data
loss, which currently stands at 26%.
Surprisingly 90% of companies said they had confidence in their
backup solutions, while at the same time 52% admitting to not
taking backups offsite and also not encrypting backed up data. Of
those companies that did take backups offsite, 36% of those across
all industry sectors had tapes taken home by a member of staff. 8%
of all companies surveyed still do not backup at all, a practice
that is more familiar to small business which account for 73% of
the overall number of companies with no backup solution in
place.
Online backup now accounts for some 23% of the backup market
share, this is split between managed (8%) and un-managed (14%)
services. Tapes are still the most widely used backup medium being
used by 36% of the companies surveyed.
"I am very pleased to see that Online Backup Services are
gaining traction in the market against more traditional backup
strategies; this certainly bears out our own experiences and what
our customers are telling us. I am sure the next twelve months will
be an interesting time for the backup industry; I think that
customers want to look for more cost effective ways of managing
their own internal resources, especially the effectiveness of their
staff and also minimize capital expenses where possible. At the
same time they are coming under more and more pressure to comply
with data protection regulations, with several high profile
examples of data loss in 2008. While we are certainly seeing a lot
more price pressure in the market place, our significant customer
wins in the first couple of months of 2009 certainly indicate a
growing need for backup as a service" says Peter Groucutt.
About The Survey
The Data Health Check Survey is the largest and most
comprehensive survey in the industry focused purely on backup and
recovery technologies and practices. Participants are invited to
submit their answers online over the course of the year with
partial and final results published in the second and last quarter
of each year.
In coming years, the survey will be measured against previous
results to reveal the trends within data security and storage
technologies and solutions used by UK businesses.
A full report can be downloaded at http://www.databarracks.com/datahealthcheck/results/
To receive reports benchmarked against niche specific industries
please contact Barbara Ferrari on +44 (0)203 177 1910 or
press@databarracks.com
About Databarracks
Databarracks is a leading provider of compliant, secure, and
effective online
backup and data
recovery services including cutting-edge
Virtual Disaster Recovery. Based in London,Databarracks manages
data security and availability for thousands of customers globally,
offering unparalleled levels of service for companies of all sizes
and profiles. www.databarracks.com