Almost a third (30%) of organisations today say that they’ve recently lost data as a result of a data centre outage over the last year. What’s more, four in ten respondents to a recent study say that they experienced at least one period of downtime. These results come from research conducted by Unitrends; a Kaseya company committed to improving confidence, uptime, and productivity in the digital communications world. The Unitrends study looked at the responses of over 400 polled individuals from businesses of all industries and sizes. The research discussed the challenges and trends that current IT departments have to face when protecting themselves against downtime and data loss.
According to the results of the survey, 58% of people said that they had been forced to recover some of their data from the cloud over the past year. Another 11% of respondents said that they had to recover data from the cloud at least five times or more. Surprisingly, more than half of respondents (55%) said that they tested their recovery capabilities for data once a year or less.
Addressing the Issues with Data Outage
According to the Vice President of Product Management at Unitrends, Joe Noonan, it’s worrying to see that many enterprises don’t know how they would recover information or applications following data loss or downtime, as they test their operations very rarely. According to Unitrends, there’s a growing need to continuously check the recovery tools available in a business, to ensure that speedy restorations are possible.
On the plus side, the Unitrends research also revealed that around 61% of small companies with between 1 and 50 employees, and 58% of mid-sized businesses with up to 1000 employees use the cloud as a solution for data protection. Around 60% of larger organisations also use the cloud for data protection purposes. Archiving and long-term retention topped the list of uses for data protection in the cloud, with 61% of respondents referencing these reasons for their cloud strategies. Additional reasons to use the cloud included hosting disaster recovery as a service and business continuity.
The Future Looks Bright for the Cloud
According to Unitrends, the future is looking bright for the potential and opportunities of the cloud. Of the 40% of brands that are currently not using the cloud for data protection purposes, around 53% are planning to adopt the technology within the next year. If these plans continue to hold true, then 80% of organisations will be using the cloud by 2020.
The survey from Unitrends suggests that the cloud is now a critical part of the data storage environment for a wide range of companies. The industry is also seeing a growth in the cloud-based disaster recovery as a service offerings in the modern landscape.
