TwinStrata’s Industry Trends: Data Backup in 2014 survey reveals an urgent need for organizations to make significant improvements to their backup strategies with one in five organizations experiencing back-up failures at least monthly and one in 10 weekly.
 
As a result, 53 percent of organizations plan to make changes to their backup strategy this year. Incorporating cloud storage was the remedy most often cited by these respondents.
 
The survey says disaster recovery was the area where backup strategies were most under stress. Just 12% predict they can recover from a site disaster within a couple hours. Cloud storage users were twice as likely to recover in that timeframe (20%) as non-cloud storage users (9%).
 
Sixty-three percent of organizations measure site recovery time in days, with 29% requiring four days or more. More than half of organizations experience backup failure multiple times a year due to a host of issues from connectivity failure (25%), equipment failure (21%) or file corruption (18%).
 
As organizations try to minimize the resource commitment required by their backup strategies, the survey found the results on management and maintenance standards alarming. The report revealed that 75% of respondents are backing up more data than they did last year, and 21% are backing up at least twice the data as last year.
 
A surprising 59% of organizations keep backups in only one location, typically a single, physical site. More than half spent six or more hours managing and maintaining their backups, and 14% spent more than 20 hours.
 
Individual applications were at greatest risk, with nearly a quarter of organizations backing up applications less often than monthly and, in some cases never.