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Article · Jan 11, 2018

IT pro survey: Truths about data protection

To better understand the IT experience during a data disaster, Carbonite commissioned a survey IT pros regarding disaster recovery practices and perceptions.

It’s the moment every IT department dreads: A data loss event takes your business offline and the countdown clock begins. Despite spending countless hours safeguarding against and preparing for this moment, the impact of downtime is immediate and all-consuming. According to IDC:

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While IT pros can’t always avoid data loss events, they can prepare for them to ensure minimal downtime.

To better understand the IT experience during a data disaster, CarboniteTM commissioned Spiceworks to survey IT pros regarding disaster recovery practices and perceptions. All survey respondents were based in the U.S. and have influence over backup/disaster recovery purchase decisions.

IT professionals harbor a healthy fear of data loss, and with good reason:

chartAccording to IDC, 80% of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) have experienced downtime at some point in the past, with costs ranging from $82,200 to $256,000 for a single event. What does this mean for IT? Every minute counts in a data recovery scenario.

Strike a deal for data
If there’s one thing we learned from talking with IT pros, it’s that they don’t like losing data. Here’s a list of things they would gladly give up instead of losing data:

data

While natural disasters, such as hurricanes and floods, tend to grab more attention, the source of most forms of data loss and downtime has nothing to do with weather.

When we asked IT pros to name the top three forms of data loss, they cited technology failures first, followed closely by man-made disasters and security incidents.

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In reality, man-made disasters, or human errors, are the single biggest cause for data loss. Next comes technology failures and then security incidents, which are becoming increasingly common.

Whatever the reason for a data loss event, its impact on the IT department is almost always all-consuming. IT pros say that a data loss event would consume 81% of their IT resources, on average.

For 57% of IT departments, these disasters demand 100% of resources, meaning that other critical IT functions fall by the wayside for the duration. In fact, among those organizations that experienced a data loss event last year, 46% reported that loss of productivity/efficiency was the biggest hurdle they faced. Many also reported increased help desk calls and system downtime.

• 46% of IT departments report that a loss of productivity/efficiency is the biggest hurdle they face.
• 29% of IT departments report an increase in help desk calls.
• 29% of IT departments report an increase in system downtime.

Small and midsized businesses are increasingly moving core business functions such as payroll, email and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to the cloud. According to Aberdeen, 80% of SMBs report some sort of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application in their organizations and 32% report having already lost SaaS data.

• 80% of businesses report some sort of SaaS applications in their organizations.
• 32% of businesses report having already lost SaaS data.

Mission-critical applications make up 10-20% of the total application portfolio in 44% of companies surveyed, according to IDC. The same IDC study reveals that 61% of SMBs say that recovery times for these mission-critical applications must be four hours or less but, in reality, recovery often takes much longer. About 44% of businesses say that mission-critical applications make up 10-20% of their total application portfolio.

About 61% of SMBs expect full recovery for mission-critical applications in fewer than 4 hours. But only 24% of IT pros said they could recover in fewer than 4 hours. A total of 54% say they are using a hybrid strategy combining onsite and cloud backup.

Getting to zero
For IT pros, the number one goal of disaster recovery is achieving zero downtime. This is increasingly becoming a factor in IT purchasing decisions. The threat of downtime is the single biggest driver of business continuity purchases for three-quarters of IT professionals. Nearly as many said that reliability is just as important.

The ability to leverage cloud technologies to increase agility and reduce costs is growing in importance to IT departments. With resources worn thin in disaster recovery scenarios, IT needs immediate access to backup and recovery solutions from anywhere and at any time. These pressures have necessitated a shift from traditional backup solutions to business continuity/disaster recovery. According to IDC:

• 81% of businesses are currently using business continuity solutions.
• 72% of businesses are planning to increase investments over the next two years.

Protect your data with Carbonite
Backup and disaster recovery is an essential component of a data protection strategy. But today’s growing businesses require additional capabilities to protect business data onsite and in the cloud—and achieve near-zero downtime for applications that must be up and running for a business to be successful. Carbonite offers a complete data protection platform for business. Here are some of the features our products offer:

• Hybrid data protection: Onsite and cloud backup ensures physical and virtual systems are protected in the event of an outage at your primary location.

• Data migration: Pain-free migrations with near-zero downtime take the hassle out of moving workloads to and between clouds.

• Broad platform support: We support more than 200 operating systems, platforms and applications, including new and legacy systems on both physical and virtual machines.

• High availability: Our software keeps critical business systems available and prevents data loss on Windows and Linux servers. Continuous replication technology maintains an up-to-date copy of your operating environment.

• Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS): Push-button disaster recovery protects data so businesses do not have to invest resources in offsite data centers.

• Flexible deployment: A wide range of deployment models, including cloud, onsite, and hybrid allows businesses to find their best fit.

• Remote management: Centralized, web-based dashboards enable unified management of backup and disaster recovery processes.

• Security: End-to-end encryption—AES 256-bit private key encryption and TLS/SSL transport security.

Protect your most valuable asset: data
Carbonite gives businesses everything they need to implement a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy for any environment with no hassles.

Learn more about Carbonite disaster recovery solutions today!

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Carbonite

News and views from the Carbonite team.

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