Veeam's Virtualisation Data Protection Report 2013 notes that 85% of small businesses experience significant problems with backup and recovery. Critical business data is being lost at an alarming rate, with one in six recoveries not working sufficiently.
The data for the survey was gathered from 500 CIOs or heads of IT, from organisations employing between 250 and 1 000 people, across the US, UK, Germany and France. Responses were from SMEs across a range of sectors.
The report highlights the key challenges for SMEs looking to provide consistent protection for critical servers and data, identifying capabilities, complexity and cost as the main obstacles.
Cost-related challenges, experienced by 85% of SMEs, include high management costs, expensive licensing models, and the large amount of storage required or used by backups. All of these problems are more pronounced for larger organisations. Because of the lower budgets of SMEs, the report identifies addressing these problems as essential: "Reducing management costs, providing easy-to-understand and low-cost licensing, and making backups as storage-friendly as possible, will be vital."
Capability-related challenges that impact on virtual backup and recovery were reported by 83% of those surveyed, and were also pronounced in larger organisations. The amount of time taken to recover virtual servers was not significantly faster than the time taken for organisations of similar sizes to recover virtual servers, which, according to the report, illustrates "a failure to realise the full potential of virtualisation-based data protection. With the right tools, entire virtual servers or individual files and application items can be recovered in a matter of minutes, allowing SMEs to recover quickly from disasters both large and small."
The complexity of the problem of virtual backup was also a concern, identified by 80% of the organisations surveyed. Among the specific difficulties reported was the requirement for ongoing management for backup, the difficulty of configuration and use of backup tools, difficulty backing up to tape, and the presence of too many virtual servers to back up.
The report notes that modern tools to automate management, schedule and configure backups, and eliminate the need for tape-based backup libraries are solutions to these problems. The proliferation of thinking that was suitable for physical-world data protection strategies is at the root of this problem, says the report, and must be replaced by modern, virtualisation-specific approaches.
Many organisations are exploring new tools to implement data protection for their virtual environments, such as changing backup tools in the next two years (55% of SMEs). The report emphasises that virtualisation-based data protection is essential in assisting SMEs to recognise the challenges identified.
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