Survey: Most Small and Medium Businesses Unprepared To Recover from IT Outages
A survey of small and medium enterprises found that only 8 percent are prepared to recover from an unplanned IT outrage, while 23 percent of them report it would take more than a day to resume operations.
Underscoring the risk to companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, a vast majority of the 453 organizations surveyed have experienced a major IT outage in the past two years. Companies with 50 to 250 employees were especially at risk. A reported 83 percent have gone through a major IT failure, while 74 percent of organizations with 250 to 1,000 employees have experienced a significant outage.
One-third are using cloud-based disaster recovery as a service, which has rapidly started to gain momentum this year, according to the survey, conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by DRaaS provider Axcient. Daniel Kuperman, director of product marketing at Axcient, said the results confirmed what the company had suspected. "In a lot of cases, companies still don't put emphasis on disaster recovery," he said.
Axcient didn't reveal whose DRaaS offerings the organizations were using, through Kuperman said Dimensional chose its own companies to poll from the researcher's own resources. DRaaS is one of the leading use cases for organizations making their foray into using cloud services.
A survey by cloud infrastructure provider EvolveIP last month found that nearly 50 percent benefitted from a recovery cloud service by avoiding outages from a disaster. Nearly three quarters, or 73 percent, cited the ability to recover from an outrage was the prime benefit of using a cloud service. As a result, 42 percent of those responding to EvolveIP's survey have increased their cloud spending budgets this year, while 54 percent plan to do so in 2015.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/05/2014 at 12:01 PM