India businesses not keen about virtual server back-up

BANGALORE, INDIA: A majority of the Indian businesses admitted that they do not back-up virtual servers as often as physical servers, despite the fact that a majority of them have experienced one or more instances of system downtime during the last 12 months owing to disasters, finds a survey commissioned by disaster recovery and back-up player Acronis.

As per the survey, owing to the downtime caused by disasters, India Inc. has lost 1.7 days, shorter than the global average of 2.2 days, and $392,082 per year, seven per cent more than the global average of $366,363 in 2011, as cost of the lost productivity.

Acronis' Global Disaster Recovery Index 2012, the second such survey, wherein Ponemon Institute conducted a survey among 6,000 businesses (including 580 from India) in 18 countries, also finds that the country still favours file-only back-ups to system and file back-ups and do not have an offsite back-up strategy in place.

Today, many businesses still take tape or disk back-up offsite each day, or replicate data to another site over a secure private connection or back up onto cloud resources.

Bill Taylor-Mountford, president, APAC, Acronis Asia, said: "Taking a back-up image of the full system allows organisations to recover an entire server or workstation quickly. This approach avoids the need to carry out the painstaking task of manually loading and configuring software that is, more often than not, the longest part of the recovery procedure. This probably explains why human error is cited as the main cause of system downtime (60 per cent).”

Physical, virtual, cloud layers of challenges

A majority of the respondents said that they find it difficult to move data between physical, virtual and cloud environments. Sixty one per cent of businesses are using two or more different back-up and DR applications.

"Eighty per cent of the Indian businesses stated that the most beneficial thing that could improve their back-up and DR strategy would be a single solution capable of delivering physical, virtual and cloud protection, in line with the global trend regardless of the different back-up and DR practices in different countries," he added.

Indian SMEs confident about DR and back-up

When it comes to disaster recovery (DR) and data back-up, small and medium businesses (SMBs) in India are much ahead of its BRIC and APAC counterparts in terms of confidence and capability, however, believes that these processes are not prioritized due to lack of IT resources, despite that on an average businesses in India spend 12 per cent, as against an Asian average of nine per cent.

"As per the survey, India with 47 per cent leads in its back-up and DR confidence level and capabilities compared to other BRIC countries and is ranked at second among the English speaking countries. And, 51 per cent of Indian organisations are confident that their back-up and DR operations will not fail; and 59 per cent believe they have enough resources to enable comprehensive back-up and DR operations.”