Backup Issues and Online Backup

The 360IT event in Earl’s Court London yesterday it highlighted some key data protection issues within the IT industry particularly within the UK. UK based SME’s are amongst the least prepared for disaster recovery planning.

Key figures from the research highlighted the following:

· 44%* did not have the ability to recover data to alternative hardware.
· 50%* of those surveyed admitted to suffering the consequences of downtime at some point in the last 6 months.
*(of 70 SME’s surveyed by Acronis)

Further researched conducted by Vanson Bourne surveyed 600 SME’s which produced some intriguing results.

· 72% of SME’s still rely on an end of day backup strategy which for smaller organisations is recommended, however, considering the survey questioned organisations with the number of employees ranging from 250-1,000 one may expected the hourly incremental data changes to be significant with the potential for data loss to be unthinkable should such a situation arise.
· 10% of SME’s only carry out weekly backups.
· The research also highlighted that for companies whose core competencies are not in IT backup and recovery issues can be extremely stressful with 59% of IT managers feeling stressed and under pressure to deliver.
· In the UK 38% of firms are failing to address desktop backup and laptop backup. Considering a large portion of live “work in progress” data is stored on end user machines this is leaving UK SME’s unnecessarily vulnerable to data loss.

The event also highlighted an industry shift towards “online backup or cloud backup” which is Redstor’s main focus and in particular emphasis on the ability to recover to alternative hardware if the need arises.
The real question for businesses operating in the knowledge economy today is what price can really be put on the safety and security of your data?
Redstor has been addressing these backup and storage issues since 1998 with Redstor Protector, Online Backup and Schools’ Backup as well as enterprise storage solutions and managed storage services for EMC and other recognised industry players.