Increasing Focus on Protecting Branch Location Data

SEPATON, Inc. announced the results of the Data Protection Index, an annual survey of large enterprises with at least 1,000 employees and at least 50 terabytes of primary data to protect.

The survey was conducted in Q2 2011 and elicited responses from 581 IT professional across North America and Europe of which 168 met SEPATON’s criteria for large enterprise. The objective of the survey was to quantify current data protection and disaster protection challenges for enterprise data centers.

Survey results indicate a growing concern in enterprise data centers about their ability to adequately protect massive data volumes and increasingly complex environments. Unabated data growth continues a data protection challenge. Large enterprises are increasingly focusing on protecting data in branch locations and in implementing more effective disaster recovery solutions.

Key findings include:

Enterprises continue to face the challenges of protecting enormous data volumes and handling rapid data growth. Data growth continues unabated with more than one third of respondents reported that their data was growing by more than thirty percent annually. The number of respondents that reported having greater than thirty percent annual growth increased from twenty-eight percent of respondents in 2010 to thirty-three percent of respondents in 2011.
Data centers now face a growing challenge of ‘sprawl’ as they add more and more systems to handle data growth. Seventy percent have had to add a disk-based data protection system to scale their backup performance or capacity in the last twenty-four months. Additional systems are adding hours of administrative burden to IT staff.
IT administration and staff time is at a premium. Seventy-four percent of enterprise respondents felt their organization fell short on data protection. The majority (thirty-five percent) cited that "team is understaffed" as the primary reason.
Disaster protection and enterprise branch office data protection are significant and increasingly growing concerns. "Data will be unrecoverable in the event of a disaster" was rated as the greatest backup/data protection fear. This fear was also evident in responses to "How well does your current disaster recovery (DR) testing prepare you for a real disaster?" as fifty-seven percent scored moderately or poorly. "File Replication" and "Reporting on Application Recovery/Replication Integrity" also scored as high spending priorities.
Enterprises are still using physical tape libraries despite initiatives to move to disk. Fifty-two percent of respondents are using physical tape to protect data in their enterprise branch offices.
Disaster recovery reporting is rated most frequently as the critical IT spending priority for 2011/2012.
Migrating to new technologies is both a wish and a fear. It rated third among stated fears that it would lead to disruption. However, it was also mentioned frequently in free form answers as a desire.
Public cloud services are being used for selected application requirements more than private cloud.

"The tremendous volume of data that is already being protected by enterprises is growing rapidly. The number of respondents that reported having greater than thirty percent annual data growth increased from twenty-eight percent in 2010 to thirty-three percent in 2011," said Joe Forgione, senior vice president, product operations and business development, SEPATON, Inc. "As a result, large enterprises experiencing massive data growth are eager to adopt data protection platforms that are specifically designed to address their requirements to simply and cost effectively scale performance and capacity independently in a single unified platform. SEPATON solutions enable them to reduce complexity, and deliver higher levels of data protection throughout the enterprise – data centers, disaster recovery site, and branch locations – while minimizing the burden to already to already understaffed IT organizations."

Full survey results report (you need to register)