Disasters spur recovery re-evaluations

IT Business Edge writes.

Ironically, it may be the many natural disasters last year, such as the widely publicised flooding in Australia and Thailand, earthquakes in New Zealand and Turkey, as well as storms that resulted in billions of dollars of damages in the US, that spurred decisions for businesses to re-evaluate and improve on their existing disaster recovery contingencies and backup procedures.

By surveying 6 000 IT practitioners in small and mid-sized businesses across 18 countries, a score was created based on average responses to 11 questions pertaining to the areas of backup and disaster recovery readiness, capabilities and practices.

Acronis also notes that SMEs in the US are failing to adapt their disaster recovery operations to new virtualised and cloud-based IT environments, Market Watch says.

Although both virtualisation and the cloud are on the rise, US SMEs are relying on outdated technologies and methodologies to protect their data in the wake of a disaster.

The 2012 Acronis Disaster Recovery Index revealed that 89% of US SMEs already have some portion of their IT infrastructure virtualised. In addition, US SMEs predict that 31% of their servers will be virtualised by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Acronis also says that previous enthusiasm for cloud infrastructure has, at least so far, failed to turn into reality, iTWire reveals.

According to Karl Sice, GM Pacific at Acronis, virtualisation has become more affordable and relatively easy for SMEs to implement, and the high growth rate of virtualisation adoption should not be a surprise.

“Since protecting data is a fundamental requirement and a best practice for any business of any size today, it's particularly disappointing that VMs get overlooked. Some businesses are potentially playing Russian roulette with their virtual backups and, if their luck runs out, will face very real consequences that may adversely impact their business.”