Nearly a third of organisations have lost data as a result of a data centre outage in the past year, while more than 42 per cent said they had experienced a period of downtime.
According to a new survey conducted by Unitrends more than half of the respondents said they had to recover at least some of their data from the cloud at least once last year, while 11 per cent in total had to recover data from the cloud five times or more. Surprisingly, however, more than half of respondents said they tested their data recovery capabilities once a year or less.
Vice president of product management, Unitrends and Spanning Joe Noonan said: “It is concerning that most enterprises don’t really know for sure if they can recover their applications after a downtime event as they test rarely or not at all. The need to continuously test recovery tools is critical to ensuring speedy business restoration.”
Unitrends research paints a picture of the growing use of cloud in data protection strategies. The survey found 61 per cent of small (1 – 50 employees), 58 per cent of mid-sized (51 – 1000) and 60 per cent of large organisations use the cloud as part of their data protection.
‘Archive/long-term retention’ topped the list of uses of cloud for data protection, with 61 per cent of the sample referencing it, followed by ‘host disaster recovery as a service (DraaS) and business continuity’ (44 per cent) and ‘store files short term’ (35 per cent).
The future continues to look bright for the cloud. Of the 40 per cent of organisations not currently using the cloud for data protection, 53 per cent of them plan to adopt it within the next year. If these plans hold true, by 2020, 80 per cent of all organisations, regardless of size, will be using the cloud for some form of data protection.
“The survey highlights that the cloud is now an active part of the data storage infrastructure of a growing number of organisations today. We are also seeing cloud-based disaster recovery-as-a-service (DraaS) becoming an increasingly widely adopted tool in data and application protection. 80 per cent of survey respondents told us they either used the cloud for DraaS or planned to do at some point in the future,” Noonan said.
