88% of Respondents Have DR Plan – Bumi

BUMI (Backup My Info!, Inc.), provider of managed online backup and recovery solutions for SMBes, announced the findings of an independent industry study of IT consultants regarding their backup and recovery tools, initiatives and concerns.

According to the survey, 88% of respondents indicated their clients have some type of backup and recovery strategy in place. However, more than one-third of respondents (39%) do not believe their clients are properly prepared for a large-scale disaster or outage.

Confidence in restoring data spanned a broad range; 79% expected the timeline to be within hours and 19% indicated it would require several days. Approximately 2% had no confidence their data would be restored correctly at all.

The study also uncovered that less than half of respondents (44%) checked client backups daily for errors, 15% checked weekly, 21% checked monthly and 8% checked annually. An astounding 13% never check for client backups for errors.

“Backup is not a ‘set it and forget it’ operation,” said Jennifer Walzer, CEO, BUMI. “This study suggests there is a lack of urgency to ensure that backup errors either do not occur or get corrected quickly. Additionally, these findings underscore the need for IT consultants, channel partners and their respective clients to work with a trusted partner to ensure backup and recovery procedures are managed proactively and continuously.”

When backup errors are found, only 19% of the IT professionals surveyed resolve them in less than an hour, 52% resolve them within a day, 25% resolve them within a week, and 4% ignore them completely.

With SaaS, hosted cloud solutions, BYOD, and virtualization becoming more prevalent, IT environments are growing in complexity. 65% of respondents thought a hybrid model of cloud and onsite appliance is the best strategy for reliable restoration of data.

Added Walzer: “While today’s complex environments support data accessibility from a broad range of devices located within and beyond the firewall, they are also vulnerable when a disaster or outage occurs. Organizations must continue to examine their backup and recovery processes and make adjustments to ensure BC and mitigate the risk of downtime.”

Additional Study Highlights

• The top three decision criteria for selecting a backup and recovery vendor are: data security, technical service and support, and technology features and functionality.
• All data is not backed up equally: Exchange and other email platforms, SQL databases and Microsoft Office files are the top three applications that take priority.
• Compliance is also a huge and ever-changing challenge: with HIPAA (52%), SOX (36%) and SEC 17a-4 (30 %) rounding out the top three regulatory requirements organizations need to adhere to with respect to backups.

The survey was conducted during the fourth quarter of 2013 and is based on responses from 100 independent IT professionals, including MSPs, VARs, and other channel consultants. Industries represented include financial services, healthcare, technology, legal, accounting, real estate, non-profit and government.