Irish backup survey finds ‘shocking practices’

MJ Flood Technology, a provider of communications solutions, has announced the results of a survey into current backup methodologies used by Irish organisations. The survey reveals ‘some shocking practices’ with 43 percent of companies having no documented disaster recovery plan in place. 90 percent are not performing weekly test restores as suggested by best practice and 31 percent admit that the storage location for backup media is not fireproof. 30 percent of those questioned are not replacing backup tapes after the prescribed 12 month period. Ironically, 61 percent of companies appear to be relatively happy with the performance of their current backup solution, rating it on a scale of 8 out of 10, where 10 is excellent.

In terms of projected spend on backup hardware/software, 43 percent of companies are not planning to allocate any IT budget in the next 12 months and backup-related spend currently accounts for less than 10 percent of the overall IT budget.

The survey also asked about perceptions of new backup technologies. Just over half, 51 percent, said that they had never heard of online backup services, for example. Of those who had considered it, 34 percent cited cost and 18 percent cited security as the main reasons why they had not chosen it as a backup platform.

30 percent of respondents are asked to recover data at least once a month with 15 percent on a quarterly basis. When requested, 48 percent said that data would need to be restored within a two hour timeframe while 21% said that restoration within a day is the expected norm. In examining ease of retrieval, 27 percent of companies admitted to having had problems restoring data and 27 percent have also had occasion to perform a full system restore.

The survey was conducted electronically during the month of December 2006 and was completed by 155 named IT contacts from a total of 2000 organisations of varying sizes. he respondees represent a broad section of Irish industry across public and private sectors.

www.mjf.ie

•Date: 2nd Feb 2007 • Region: W.Europe •Type: Article •Topic: BC statistics
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