Axcient Study Shows Few Companies Are Prepared For Major IT Failures
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
In a survey of more than 450 IT professionals regarding the current state of IT resiliency, Axcient found that, although the vast majority of organizations agree that backup and disaster recovery abilities are crucial, most remain unable to recover from a major IT failure within two hours.
According to a press release, the study found that most of those surveyed believe that current backup and recovery methodologies are incomplete. Current solutions for backup and recovery are also unnecessarily complex, with 90 percent of IT professionals using multiple backup and recovery tools. A full 91 percent report that the use multiple tools is problematic. And while a relatively low percentage of businesses are currently leveraging the cloud to protect their critical data and systems, 89 percent admit that they can see value in cloud-based backup and disaster recovery. Benefits cited include faster recovery time after a disaster (53 percent), less IT time spent on backup and recovery tasks (50 percent), immediate access to applications and data in the event of a disaster (45 percent), ability to fully recover (44 percent), and overall cost reduction (36 percent). Additionally, more than 50 percent exhibited more confidence in cloud-based recovery solutions in the case of system failure for recovering all operations in two hours or less.
“Every year, businesses lose more than $40 billion due to application downtime and permanent data loss. This research gives a sense of why. With multiple, disparate, legacy tools for backup and recovery, current solutions are broken. As a result, users are unable to recover their systems in the event of an IT outage, or even worse, a disaster,” said Justin Moore, CEO of Axcient, in the press release.
Despite the dramatic impact of unscheduled downtime on finances, most businesses don't have adequate recovery technologies in place: 79 percent of those surveyed experienced a major IT failure within the past two years, while only 7 percent were confident that they could recover operations within two hours.
“Complete protection and recovery is imperative for all companies, regardless of size,” said Diane Hagglund, senior research analyst at Dimensional Research, which conducted the study commissioned by Axcient.
“Given the staggering complexity and limitation of traditional on-premise backup and recovery solutions, there is clear value in fully transitioning to a single, comprehensive cloud-based solution. Although cloud-based backup and recovery is still early in adoption, the recovery market is ripe for innovation, and cloud is the next frontier. I look forward to seeing how this market grows in the coming years.”
The full Dimensional Research survey report may be found here, and an infographic highlighting the findings is available at here.