South African organisations are spending over half a billion rand per year on tape for backup, which is an outdated solution.
So said Kelly Brown, EMEA director of product marketing for EMC's Backup Recovery Systems (BRS) Division, when presenting the findings of EMC's SA BRS Disaster Recovery Research in Johannesburg yesterday.
"In South Africa, 44% of organisations use backup tapes for disaster recovery purposes, which comes with sizable recurring costs," said Ferguson.
"On average, companies in South Africa replace their backup tapes seven times per year and are spending each year an average of R544 765 on transporting, storing, testing and replacing backup tapes for the purpose of disaster recovery."
Brown also pointed out that the figure can actually be higher if administrative costs are also factored in.
However, she pointed out that the survey discovered that 82% of organisations using tape in SA would like to move away from tape mainly to boost the speed of data recovery and system restores; faster backups; durability; as well as improved deduplication; and greater reliability from automatic error, among other factors.
On the other hand, Brown also noted that of those local organisations that are using disk backup, a majority (53%) are not storing to purpose-built backup appliances.
She explained that while plain disk offers some advantages over tape, it is not designed for backup workloads.
"Purpose-built backup appliances include deduplication technology to shrink the footprint of the backup capacity and to make it possible to replicate with minimal bandwidth requirements. Finally, purpose-built backup appliances include technology to ensure the accuracy of backups and the on going integrity of data stored.
"When you think about your backup as the 'storage of last resort' - you want to make sure recovery will work. Only purpose-built backup appliances are designed to give the confidence of recovery - something plain disk and tape can't match."
According to the survey, more than half of companies in SA have suffered from either systems downtime or data loss in the past 12 months.
On average, Brown explained, more than 500GB - or the equivalent of more than five million e-mail messages were lost.
"Organisations lost on average two work days to these disruptions, representing as much as 32 000 hours of lost productivity for a 2 000-person company. The reality is that the vast majority in South Africa aren't very confident that they can fully recover after a significant disruption."
She added that the survey found out that 56% of the local organisations review backup and recovery plans or procedures only after disaster strikes; while 39% increased spending on backup and recovery after disaster strikes; with 31% saying they needed a day or more to return to full business operations.
"Disruption always happens in businesses," she said. "Downtime and data loss are more likely to result from an IT problem than a natural disaster with some pretty significant business impacts.
"The financial impacts of such disruptions include lost revenue, loss of employee productivity and decreased customer loyalty."
According to EMC, using next-gen backup solutions like disk may see organisations earning 450% return on investment within a seven-month payback period and $1.4 million in tape-related costs over three years.
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