Infotech Lead America: According to the results of a recent survey by Spiceworks, a vertical network for IT, 45 percent of respondents said their organization had experienced a data loss, costing an average of nearly $9,000 in recovery fees.
Of those, 54 percent say the data loss was due to a hardware failure. Though data protection is a priority for organizations, it is still a challenge for SMBs.
The study “Backing up SMBs” is sponsored by Carbonite, a provider of cloud backup solutions for consumers and small businesses. It was based on the results of a survey conducted with more than 1,000 SMB IT professionals. The survey mainly investigates backup and recovery budgets, technologies, planning, and key considerations for companies with fewer than 1,000 employees.
It was found that SMBs spend an average of $5,700 each year to manage data backup and recovery environments. While 70 percent of the respondents were satisfied with current backup methods, 30 percent of the respondents felt that their approaches and technologies still leave a lot to desire.
When asked about their company’s readiness regarding disaster recovery, 42 percent of SMBs felt that their company’s plans needed to be ramped up. Only 30 percent were confident about their company’s ability to recover from a disaster.
Approximately 60 percent of SMBs use the direct-attached storage (DAS) method to back up information. Hosted or cloud-based backup and recovery offerings seem to be slowly finding its place of importance among SMBs. Presently, 30 percent of SMBs use hosted solutions and 14 percent plan to invest in a hosted offering within the next year.
Reliability and security are of prime importance to SMBs considering hosted backup solutions. Of those SMBs that are already using or are planning to implement a private, hybrid or public cloud backup platform, 77 percent prefer a private or hybrid approach while 23 percent favor a public cloud offering.
According to IDC, majority of SMBs resort to backup to tape/removable media and disk as the leading methods of data protection and replication is seen gaining traction. Online data protection services are cautiously being adopted.
Small businesses are especially concerned about ease of use due to their limited IT support resources, while medium businesses are more concerned about product functionality and seamless integration than about pricing and brand. Small businesses readily implement online backup, remote replication, and CDP methods while medium sized firms prefer remote replication and CDP, as well as VTL and online replication.
