The Disaster Recovery Blame Game
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Downtime Devastates Productivity
84% of respondents cited employee productivity as the greatest impact of unscheduled downtime, followed by 74% for less efficient business operations and 57% for damage to the firm's reputation. -
Lost Revenue Plagues Majority
53% of respondents said business revenue would be lost during unscheduled downtime, and 49% said they would incur unplanned costs to recover systems. -
What Gets Backed Up
71% of companies back up data and applications, while 29% only back up data. Just a few are backing up all data and all applications. -
Data Backup vs. Applications Backup
41% of IT professionals surveyed back up all their data, and 6% back up only mission-critical data. 24% back up all their data and all their applications. -
Applications Backup
37% of respondents back up all their applications, 18% back up only their mission-critical apps and 45% back up more than mission-critical apps but not all of their apps. -
Mid-Level Blamed For Failures
79% SMBs report major IT failures during the last two years. Only 8% recover within an hour and 23% within a day. Whose fault is that? 69% said mid-level IT staff (IT directors and team managers) would be held responsible for lost data. -
CIO and IT Execs Blamed Less
Only 41% of respondents said the CIO or another IT exec would be held responsible if critical data could not be recovered after a system disaster. Frontline workers were next, at 33%. -
Jobs at Stake
The consequences of lost data are severe: 51% believe someone could lose their job if data is lost, 75% said it could lead to a poor performance review , 44% said it could blemish their professional reputation, 41% cite lost opportunities for promotion. -
What SMBs Do to Recover
54% of respondents use different backup and recovery tools to back up physical servers and virtual servers, and 46% use the same tools for both purposes. -
Reasons for Different Backup Tools
74% of respondents said they need different tools for different environments, and 39% said they use different tools to create redundancy. -
Challenges of Backup and Recovery Tools
The most frequently cited challenge (67%) is that teams must learn many solutions. 59% report that additional efforts would be necessary for recovery when using multiple solutions. -
The Cloud Can Help
Cloud-based backup and recovery solutions appeal to SMBs. Of the 38% who use them, most use cloud backup for data only, while 14% use cloud-based recovery solutions for applications.
Backup and disaster recovery are crucial for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), and, if not implemented correctly, it can lead to finger-pointing if critical data is wiped out. A new report, "The State of IT Recovery for SMBs," finds that mid-level IT staff members are most likely to be held responsible for recovery problems and lost data. According to the report, "The majority of individuals [69%] reported that mid-level IT staff such as IT directors or other IT team managers would be held responsible for lost data. Mid-level IT staff were considered to be held responsible much more than the CIO or other IT executives (41%), or admins and other front-line IT staff (33%)." Axcient, a cloud-based Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) company, commissioned marketing research firm Dimensional Research to conduct the study. It gleaned 453 respondents from an independent database of IT professionals responsible for backup and recovery of data and applications at companies with from 50 to 1,000 employees in the United States and Canada. "Every year, businesses lose more than $40 billion due to application downtime and permanent data loss. This research gives a sense of why," says Justin Moore, Axcient CEO.
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