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Australian companies don’t trust their backups
Who would have thought?
Australian businesses – particularly SMBs – have little confidence in their disaster recovery strategies, according to research detailed to the media yesterday by Acronis.
It is not clear if this is because most SMB backup and DR strategies are managed by the owner of the business, usually not a technologist, or because experience has taught businesses that backups can fail.
However, the 3,000-plus respondents to the international study, conducted for Acronis by the Ponemon Institute, clearly show a lack of confidence by Australians in DR, compared to their international counterparts.
The study found that just 22 per cent of Australian businesses were confident in their backup/DR strategies. The rest were concerned that they might suffer a failure in the event of a serious incident or event. Globally, the average was 50 per cent.
Considering the recent catastrophic floods in Queensland, northern NSW and Victoria, respondents’ concerns probably weren’t misplaced. It could be argued that Australian respondents were merely more realistic than those in countries such as Germany, who believe their systems and data would survive disaster.
According to ANZ country manager Simon Howe, it’s perhaps more concerning that 36 per cent of respondents have no offsite backup capability.
Asked by El Reg whether the lack of confidence also related to the abysmal quality of the backup software most SMBs are familiar with – for example, utilities that ship bundled with external drives, and have the build quality of an East German car – Howe agreed that “vendors should deliver more effective solutions”.
He said that “most SMB backup software started life as an enterprise product, which the vendor then stripped features out of.” ®