Updated SMB Edition
Executive Summary
For the first time, the Virtualization Data Protection Report 2013 looks at the challenges that Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are facing with data protection strategies for their virtual environments. This year’s report investigates whether organizations are confident in their data protection capabilities for their virtual environments. It identifies specific issues SMBs are experiencing with their virtual environments and suggests some of the underlying causes behind these.
In particular, it highlights how capabilities, complexity and cost are key challenges for organizations of this size wishing to consistently protect their most critical servers and data. Currently, 85% of SMBs are experiencing issues around cost, 83% around capability, and 80% around complexity. Partly this is based on continued attempts to apply “traditional”, physical-world based strategies to data protection in virtual environments, instead of adopting a more modern approach.
The report also demonstrates some of the actions organizations are taking to deal with the challenges they face in implementing data protection in their virtual environments. For example, 55% of SMBs plan to change their tools for backing-up virtual environments in the next 2 years.
The report has also uncovered a variation between the backup and recovery capabilities of SMBs of differing sizes. In general the larger an SMB is the less effective its backup and recovery was found to be, based on measurements such as the time to recover virtual servers or individual files and the proportion of the virtual infrastructure that can be backed up.
Finally, the report shows how modern virtualization-based data protection can help SMBs address a number of challenges that would otherwise be too costly or complex to tackle in a traditional manner. For example, 65% of SMBs surveyed believe that the costs of specialist e-discovery tools are prohibitively expensive: a problem that can be addressed by using modern data protection tools to identify and recover relevant emails and other files when necessary. There is also the technique of replication: which can be costly to implement traditionally, but is becoming rapidly more affordable with the use of virtualization and modern data protection tools.
The report is based on an online survey conducted in November and December 2012 by Vanson Bourne, an independent market research organization. It surveyed 500 CIOs or heads of IT from organizations across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France that employ between 250 and 1,000 people. The report is sponsored by Veeam Software.
