65% of Organizations Experiencing Frequent Data Loss From Virtual Environments

IT professionals surveyed reported that 65 percent of organizations frequently experienced data loss from a virtual environment. This represents a 140 percent increase in virtual data loss when compared to last year’s survey.

This survey, conducted by Kroll Ontrack Inc., provided insight into virtual environment data loss frequency and recovery management.

Key findings indicate that 53 percent of those surveyed experienced five virtual data loss incidents in the past year and 12 percent of respondents experienced data loss more than five times in the past twelve months.

Common causes of data loss from virtualized environments include file system corruption, deleted virtual machines, internal virtual disk corruption, RAID and other storage/server hardware failures and deleted or corrupt files contained within virtualized storage systems. A virtualization data loss can be catastrophic for an organization. Determining the financial impact of a business disruption is difficult because there are both tangible factors, including productivity loss, missed sales opportunities and staff’s hourly time, but also less tangible factors such as potential non-compliance penalties, damage to corporate image and weakened customer confidence. A Forrester-DRJ survey noted that 15 percent of respondents knew the cost of their business’ downtime; it averaged nearly $145,000 per hour.

"Successful organizations realize that any disruption within the virtual infrastructure, regardless of how small, will have an amplified impact on the business as a whole," said Jeff Pederson, manager of data recovery operations, Kroll Ontrack. "Virtualization contracts often claim no liability for data corruption, deletion, destruction or loss. As a result, it is critical for IT leaders and business continuity planners to proactively include a data recovery service provider in their contingency plans."

In addition to implementing virtual data centers onsite, organizations are increasingly turning to third-party cloud providers as a means of data storage. When asked about their cloud provider’s ability to properly handle data loss incidents, 55 percent revealed a lack of confidence. In fact, only 39 percent of respondents said their cloud provider educated their organization on how they would approach a data disaster/data recovery situation from the cloud.

"Users of the cloud need to demand more than offsite storage, asynchronous/synchronous replication or tape backups in the SLA," said Pederson. "The best ‘umbrella’ to have when adopting cloud technology is to require your cloud service provider to partner with a reputable, full-service data recovery company. A cloud provider that has partnered with a reputable data recovery service provider is demonstrating that data availability is more important than system uptime or accessibility."

Three hundred and sixty nine IT professionals participated in this in-person survey at VMworld 2011. Seventy-nine percent of those surveyed considered themselves VMware or virtualization subject matter experts.