Q&A with Izzy Azeri at Acronis

IA: The Acronis Global DR Index is an annual barometer that provides a country-level ranking of backup and DR confidence levels and capabilities of businesses around the world. The aim of the Index is to give all businesses a clearer understanding of how their confidence and capabilities compare to those of their peers in other countries as well as giving them the ability to rank themselves. The key findings were all based on confidence and adoption rates for the SMB markets.  We commissioned a third party (The Ponemon Institute) to poll more than 3000 IT managers with 30 questions in 13 countries. One significant takeaway is the fact that in the US almost one-third of the SMB’s surveyed had no DR plan in place at all.

IA: The most interesting findings were definitely around the greatly increasing adoption rates of virtualization and Cloud environments. For service providers, this data allows great insight into what they can expect to see this year in terms of where the growth will be. In general, most countries expect to increase their virtual server usage by around 50 percent over the next 12 months (from 22 percent to 33 percent) and the Cloud adoption rates were even higher.

IA: Historically, in terms of backing up and disaster recovery, small businesses have not treated their virtual environments the same way that they have treated their physical environments. It’s the countries that did acknowledge that their virtual, or Cloud for that matter, environments were just as mission critical as their physical, were the ones who fared better in the results.

IA: Consolidate… if you are virtualizing your servers, or looking to move to a Cloud or Online platform, look for a solution that can meet all your needs with one single interface and one  that can handle the backups and recovery from all three environments, physical, virtual and Cloud. We saw too many accounts in the Index that were using multiple backup solutions and that can confuse accurate recovery. Some respondents had as high as five separate backup solutions in place, that is a practice that can lead to confusion and an unwieldy disaster recovery and backup results.