Almost three quarters of companies and public-sector organisations across nine European countries might not recover all of their data if they suffer an IT failure according to a new report released by the IT group EMC. For the survey a total of 1,750 European companies and organisations were quizzed across the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Benelux and Russia with each organisation ranging in size from 250 to 3000+ employees.
The research’s findings are worrying indeed.
- 74% of organisations are not very confident that they can fully recover after a disaster, according to a new survey of 1,750 European companies
- 54% surveyed have lost data and/or suffered systems downtime in the last year
- 61% report hardware failure as the primary cause of data loss and downtime; natural disasters and employee sabotage being much less likely culprits
- 43% of organisations cite loss of employee productivity as the single biggest economic impact
- 28% point to lost revenue as a result of a disaster
- 40% of organisations still use tape for recovery and 80% of these organisations want to replace tape all together, highlighting the need for next generation backup and recovery
The fact that 74% of companies and organisations feel that they’re not prepared or equipped to properly recover data after an outage or disaster might be seen as very worrying for business overall. We’ve all suffered data loss but the data losses suffered by business could affect us and them in many different ways. They could lose customer orders, lose valuable employee details or details of current projects and so on.
They say the most commonly reported causes of downtime are…
- Hardware failure: 61%
- Power failure: 42%
- Data corruption: 35%
One of the problems seems to be that 40% of the companies surveyed are still replying on tape for backup. With the falling costs of hard disks and the increased bandwidth that dedicated phone lines can bring more and more companies are moving to secure and stable off-site backup solutions and indeed many business ISPs and server hosts now offer this facility as standard. It is clear though that not enough companies are heeding the warnings of data loss and, more important of good security.
The research found that businesses are spending, on average, 10% of their IT budgets on backup and recovery, and 29% of businesses do not feel they are spending enough. For backup and disaster recovery purposes, 40% of companies still rely on tape, with an average annual cost of €74,000 on transporting, storing, testing and replacing tapes. Where tape is used for disaster recovery purposes, 10% still have an employee take home a copy of the backup tapes with them.
The companies surveyed included manufacturing, retail, financial services and telecoms, among others and, frankly, it is disappointing that so many companies still seem unprepared for IT and data failures when computers have now been in business for over 30 years and have been on every desk for the vast majority of that time.
© Mike Halsey (MVP) for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Now it’s not always easy to back data up on tablets and smartphones, though some services such as HP’s TouchPad do back your data up securely by default. You can also get third-party backup software for these devices. More often than not though you will find that the data on these devices is almost always duplicated elsewhere, such as in your email account. It’s best in these cases then simply to make certain that these devices are protected by a secure password. To create a secure password use a combination of letters, numbers and symbols and make the password at least eight, preferably ten or more, characters.
