Many companies have a false sense of confidence in their backup solutions

The results from a backup and recovery survey conducted by Databarracks indicate that overall, 91 percent of companies claim to be confident in their backup solution. Upon further investigation, 74 percent of those who do not use encryption or replication and do not take backups offsite are confident despite skipping these steps. Furthermore, 67 percent still consider their backup solution to be secure even though they do not keep or check backup logs and do not test their restores to ensure that they are working properly.

Peter Groucutt, managing director at Databarracks says “the results of the survey show that although most companies understand the importance of having business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place, there seems to be a knowledge gap when it comes to understanding the technologies that are currently available to deliver reliable and fast recovery in the event of a system failure. These days it is not enough to blindly trust that backups are being completed properly. Businesses and the regulatory environment in which we all exist demand fast and reliable recovery time objectives for IT systems. Such is the pace at which a modern company transacts business these days that those who are without their IT for any great length of time are losing serious money. Customers are also becoming a lot more aware of the information that companies hold and are getting less and less forgiving about delivery disruption, let alone the thought of their sensitive data being transported in a an unencrypted and readable format.”

The survey also reveals that 27 percent of companies’ data loss is caused by human error, 26 percent from hardware failure, and 19 percent from software failure. A previous survey indicated that hardware failure caused the majority of data loss at 61 percent, while human error only accounted for 2 percent.

“This change in causes of data loss can possibly be attributed to improvements in software and hardware resiliency in the last two years which has reduced the number of hardware and software failures affecting computers, changing the way these threats need to be addressed in business continuity and disaster recovery plans moving forward,” speculates Oscar Arean, Databarracks’ technical support manager.

The results above are based on the first 500 respondents to Databarracks ‘Data Health Check Survey’. The survey will remain open for participation on an ongoing basis. All results are anonymous and benchmarking reports are emailed automatically once the survey has been completed. Anyone interested in participating in the Data Health Check or viewing a sample report can do so online by visiting www.databarracks.com/datahealthcheck

•Date: 8th August 2008• Region: UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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