Business continuity and disaster recovery drive the UK archiving markets

A survey by BridgeHead Software into the drivers behind the growth of data archiving has found that business continuity and disaster recovery are by far the strongest factors causing UK companies to initiate archival projects.

To the question ‘Which factors are driving the need for archiving in your organisation?’, disaster recovery and business continuity were cited by 48 percent of respondents. The second most frequently declared factor is the sheer volume of data growth, at 27 percent. Compliance and corporate governance activity was offered as a driver by 22 percent of respondents.

Asked the question ‘If regulatory compliance is a driving need, which [of the following] are impacting your business?’, 48 percent of respondents don’t identify regulatory compliance as a factor at all. The key regulations affecting business in the UK remain the Data Protection Act (27 percent) and the Freedom of Information Act (12 percent). Only 6 percent of respondents mentioned Sarbanes Oxley.

Tony Cotterill, CEO of BridgeHead Software said: “This is a bit of a wake-up call for the storage industry: for all that ‘compliance’ has been made one of today’s major buzzwords, it seems IT directors know that US compliance regulations affect relatively few of them, and perhaps they realise compliance is largely achievable as a by-product of good, day-to-day, data housekeeping.

“Of course, the twin horses of disaster recovery and business continuity have also been whipped really hard by vendors, and this has been accepted by users who quite rightly identify that disasters don’t respect national borders,” he added.

Despite acknowledging the importance of archiving for backup and disaster recovery purposes, it appears that it’s still something of a ‘dark art’ for a significant proportion: 15 percent of respondents are unable to say how long it would take to retrieve a lost file, and 2 percent admit that they probably wouldn’t be able to retrieve it at all.

Thirty two per cent of those who could actually find a lost file would need between an hour and a day to track down such a file and 6 percent need more than a day.

“By the time that file came back the user will have already started to recreate it or survive without it, with all the waste that that entails” comments Tony Cotterill.

These findings are part of a broader survey entitled The Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Audit, conducted by BridgeHead Software during July 2005. Over 300 IT managers and directors took part in the survey.

•Date: 9th August 2005 • Region: UK• Type: Article •Topic: BC general
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