Survey: 15.5 Percent Of Educational Institutions Lost Critical Data In A Disaster

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

A survey conducted by cloud services company Evolve IP found that 34 percent of respondents experienced an incident that required disaster recovery, with 28 percent of educational institutions losing data permanently. Among educational institutions, 15.5 percent lost critical data that could not be recovered, and 15.5 percent of their backups were not recoverable. In addition, more than 40 percent of all those who have suffered an outage or incident have had multiple incidents in the past five years.

The study concludes that educational institutions “are clearly the least prepared for disaster recovery, and that they don’t have the proper budget to develop the most effective DR/BC [disaster recovery/business continuity] plan.”

The study polled 2,084 IT professional and executives about the latest practices, trends and challenges for organizations regarding disaster recovery, business continuity planning, and other related topics resulted in several notable statistics.

According to the survey, only 45.5 percent of those surveyed reported being “very prepared” to recover IT assets in the event of a disaster, with 50.5 percent only “somewhat prepared” and another 5 percent claim they are not prepared, while 45 percent are still relying on antiquated backup tape technology for disaster recovery. Of these, only 25.5 percent of educational institutions consider themselves “very prepared” to recover from a disaster.

Meanwhile, 64 percent responded that business continuity or disaster recovery is a compliance requirement for their organization, and the study determined that those with compliance requirements were more conscientious about DR and fare better during incidents and recovery.

The study also found that the leading cause (47 percent) of incidents and outages is hardware failure or server room issues, followed by environmental disasters (flood, fire, ice storm, etc. at 34.5 percent), and miscellaneous outages (27.5 percent).

Among those who stated that they had DR services in place, the majority were not yet utilizing “best practices” for effective DR, such as a DRaaS [Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service] solution form a service provider (6 percent) or DR in a hosted or MSP (managed services provider) environment (15 percent).

Among the more startling findings of the study was that nearly half of the government agencies that use a secondary site (46 percent) as a backup, have it located less than 25 miles away from the main site. That figure was 27.5 percent for education.

The Evolve study shows that 41 percent of those surveyed were unfamiliar with the term DRaaS before participating in the poll. Once the term had been defined, 16 percent of participants noted that they already had a DRaaS solution in place, while 52 percent said they are considering adding a DRaaS solution.