Disaster recovery baffles data managers

Disaster recovery is the top challenge for data managers, with much of the information lost due to lags in recovery time and lack of backups, according to a new survey by vendor, Iron Mountain, Information Management writes.

Iron Mountain questioned 1 200 data management and recovery officials on their data recovery awareness, practices and responses.

Sixty-eight-percent stated that disaster recovery is their biggest data challenge, with less than half (44%) having successfully recovered information after a recent data recovery event.

The top two reasons for data loss after a disaster were lag in recovery time (27%) and lack of necessary backup files (15%).

“At its basic level, controlling data is about controlling risk, which means being prepared in the event of disaster so that you can restore your business without losing its most important asset - information,” says Blaine Rigler, senior VP and GM for data backup and recovery at Iron Mountain, Ontrack Data Recovery notes.

Writing for Continuity Central, Dr Jim Kennedy, who has 30 years' experience dealing with information and cyber security, claimed this strategy will also help recover data following power outages.

Only 17% have a formal plan for how different types of data should be retained or destroyed, WBJournal.com reveals.

Only 20% of companies used cloud technology, and those that did were most likely to be small organisations with less data.