About the Research

The Acronis Global Disaster Recovery (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. It’s the industry’s largest backup and disaster recovery benchmark.

The survey is based on responses of almost 6,000 IT practitioners (double last year’s 3,000) in the original thirteen countries and five new countries: Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States.

The survey used a combination of omnibus and custom survey sampling methods that include proprietary samples of qualified IT practitioners in small-to-medium-sized businesses (mid-market companies with no more than 500 seats in Australia). The Ponemon Institute carried out all phases of this research, which was conducted between September and October 2011.

The breakdown of size of business surveyed in Australia
• 1-50 seats: 24%
• 51-100 seats: 38%
• 101-500 seats: 38%

Key Local Findings

Australia has more than doubled in confidence in the past year (from 0.25 to 0.59, 136% increase), showing that when disaster strikes it became more confident in its DR capabilities. However, its index position remains the lowest among English speaking countries, still behind the US and the UK.

Compared to the previous year, Australian organisations are
• 36% more confident that their backup and DR operations won’t fail
• 22% more confident that they had boardroom support
• 32% more confident that they had enough resources
• 39% more confident that they had the necessary technologies.

The top 3 things that Australian businesses have done to improve their backup and disaster recovery operations due as a consequence of natural disasters in 2011 include
• Tested backups more regularly
• Implemented a full-scale business continuity plan
• Invested in a third party data centre

Despite the increase in confidence and boardroom support, 64% of the Australian businesses are concerned that that their back up and DR operations may fail in the wake of a serious incident or event, compared to a global average of 50%. And 41% think they could possibly suffer substantial downtime in the event of serious incidents.

With a flat spend on backup and DR (10% of the IT budget, almost the same as last year), Australian companies cited that the lack of budget (31%) is the No. 1 reason for their backup and DR plan not being given more priority, followed closely by the lack of IT resources (25%).

It’s surprising to find out that 61% of the Australian businesses are still carrying out file-only backups instead of system and file backups, compared to 44% globally. Taking a backup image of the full system allows organisations to recover an entire server or workstation quickly. This approach avoids the need to carry out the painstaking task of manually loading and configuring software that is, more often than not, the longest part of the recovery procedure. It probably explains why human error is cited as the main cause of system downtime (60%).

Over a third (36%) Australian companies don’t have an offsite backup strategy (23% globally), same as the previous year, despite horrendous flooding in early 2011.

Offsite backup and DR practices differ a lot among Australian businesses.
• 36% don’t have an offsite backup strategy
• 28% still take tape or disk backups offsite each day
• 38% do replicate data to another site over a secure private connection
• 14% back up onto cloud resources.

It proves the different level of understanding towards backup and DR among SMBs and the importance of education.

The vast majority of Australian organisations surveyed (82%) had experienced one or more instances of system downtime during the past 12 months that had, on average, lasted 1.9 days, marginally shorter than the global average 2.2 days. However, the cost of the lost productivity due directly to this downtime amounts to a shocking USD$408,077, 11% more than the global average USD $366,363 per year.

38% of Australians admitted that they do not backup their virtual servers as often as physical servers. More than half (62%) back up their virtual machines weekly or monthly.

Every region cited moving data between physical, virtual and cloud environments as their greatest challenge (69% in Australia) with regards to backing up in a hybrid environment. With 42% of Australians using three or more different backup and DR applications, it is clear why they cited complexity (63%) as their second biggest challenge.

89% of Australian businesses want reliable and easy-to-use solutions, compared to 94% globally, and it’s the resellers that can help them choose the right solution and guide them to a solid backup and DR strategy.

I recently chatted with Monetate about their new Agility Suite and how that may impact online marketers through 2012.

Kristina: We’re hearing a lot of buzz about real time data and customer experience. Are these going to be two hot areas throughout 2012?

Blair Lyon, Vice President, Marketing, Monetate: The primary challenge we hear consistently from CMOs is identifying technologies that help them improve the customer experience. In daily operations, marketers are constrained by their internal systems, and they’re frustrated that they cannot effectively execute on what consumers expect. They are being challenged to handle complex ideas and maintain relevancy across new consumer touchpoints, and they require tools that provide them with the agility to do so. The organizations that rise above the competition in 2012 and beyond will be the ones that figure out how to effectively harness the vast amount of customer data they have access to, and use it to deliver a more relevant online experience.

Kristina: For all brands, not just retailers, how important is the personalized experience?

Blair: It is imperative for all brands to make the customer’s online experience more relevant and more targeted. Consumers’ needs are affected by a wide range of factors, such as past site behavior, demographic information, geographic factors like the weather, what device they’re using to access your site, where they’ve been before and where they came from. Making the messaging and content on the website extremely relevant first requires the ability to change a customer’s experience in real-time, and then the ability to change that experience based on data (both historical and real time). Customers, even the non-retail customer, will keep coming back if you give them a smart and relevant online experience.

Kristina: Is this type of targeting about lengthening site visits or about increasing conversions?

Blair: Targeting can be about lengthening site visits, increasing site conversion, and a wide range of other factors. Different types of businesses have different key performance metrics that they are trying to achieve. That’s why testing and site optimization are so important, because you can quickly identify and influence areas in which you can positively increase your business goals.

Kristina: How does Monetate’s Agility Suite make the customer experience better?

Blair: In order to dramatically improve the customer experience, CMO’s need to move faster, act on real-time data, and change website content quickly and easily. The Monetate Agility Suite allows marketers to leverage the speed of the cloud and browser technology to do things that were previously seen as impossible or too costly to implement. Now marketers can dramatically improve conversion rates with the ability to test an unlimited number of marketing campaigns outside the IT queue, connect with key segments of website traffic in real time, maintain messaging consistency between distinct marketing channels throughout the purchasing cycle, optimally merchandise and display products, and change anything, anywhere within the web experience.

Los Angeles-based Central Desktop, the developer of online project and collaboration software which is headed by Isaac Garcia, claimed yesterday that it has seen growth in both its employees and customers last year.

The company said it grew its staff by 43 percent in 2011, and increased its enterprise customer base by 41 percent. The company did not disclose any employment numbers or actual finances. Central Desktop offers up a variety of cloud-based, collaboration tools used for managing projects, departments, and teams. The firm is venture backed by OpenView Venture Partners.

Acronis, a leading provider of disaster recovery and data protection for physical, virtual and cloud environments, has been honored in two leading awards for virtual server backup and recovery solutions during January 2012.

Launched in August 2011, Acronis® vmProtect™ has received the Bronze award for Backup & Storage in the SearchServerVirtualization.com Products of The Year 2011 awards. Nominations for these awards were submitted by vendors and users then evaluated by a panel of independent judges. The ease-of-use of Acronis® vmProtect™ was highlighted as a key differentiator in this award category.

Acronis Backup & Recovery® Virtual Edition was recognized by the Virtualization Review 2012 Reader’s Choice Awards as a Preferred Product in the Business Continuity category. The 2012 awards are chosen directly by the readers of Virtualization Review and presented to vendors in 14 categories, ranging from server virtualization to virtualization automation and virtualization security.

“Business Continuity has become a core component of IT operations today,” commented Bruce Hoard, editor-in-chief for Virtualization Review. “With the growth in multi-hypervisor environments, the ability of Acronis Backup & Recovery® Virtual Edition to manage backup and recovery from a single console and across all major hypervisors was recognized as a competitive advantage by our readers.”

To date, Acronis estimates that Acronis Backup & Recovery ® Virtual Edition and Acronis® vmProtect™ have protected over 200,000 virtual machines for customers worldwide(1). In addition to backup and disaster recovery, the powerful, unlimited migration capabilities have allowed businesses of all sizes to seamlessly move nearly 1,000,000 servers between physical, virtual and cloud environments.

“To be chosen by readers and independent experts who use backup & recovery solutions for virtual servers every day, and understand the challenges and innovations for the technology indicates that we continue to gain traction in the market,” commented Dmitri Joukovski, vice president, product management at Acronis. “We have developed two solutions for virtual server backup and recovery — one for single environment backup and recovery optimized for VMware, and one that allows users to manage physical servers and all major hypervisors from a single solution. Both these products were developed with the end user in mind — whether it is speed and simplicity or ease of management and increased efficiency that is their highest priority. We are honored to be recognized by both these awards.”

For more information about the SearchServerVirtualization.com 2011 Product of the Year Awards and to view the complete list of winners visit:http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/guides/Products-of-the-Year-2011.

The winners of the Virtualization Review Readers Awards are highlighted in the December 2011/January 2012 issue. A downloadable PDF of the article is also available atwww.VirtualizationReview.com.

(1) Based on industry assumed average of 10VMs per host.

About Acronis

Acronis is a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Its patented disk imaging technology enables corporations, SMBs and consumers to protect their digital assets. With Acronis’ disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime. Acronis software is sold in more than 90 countries and available in up to 14 languages. For additional information, please visitwww.acronis.com. Follow Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis

Acronis®, Acronis Backup & Recovery ®, vmProtect™ and the Acronis logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Acronis Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

Instructure™ (www.instructure.com) announced Canvas K-12™, a new learning management platform that co-enrolls parents with their students in schools, makes state standards tracking painless and provides actionable analytics to teachers and administrators.

More than a dozen K-12 school districts, including Rockingham County School District in North Carolina and Park City School District in Utah, are leveraging Canvas today to save teachers time and improve learning.

“Rockingham held big expectations for Canvas, and I’ve been extremely pleased with its performance and the reaction of our teachers,” said Dennis Frye, Director of Instructional Technology and Media at Rockingham County School District. “Our implementation process has been a huge success. We’re looking forward to a long future with Canvas.”

Instructure launched Canvas to post-secondary institutions in February 2011. Since that time, more than 100 institutions have chosen Canvas as their learning platform, including Brown University, Auburn University and the Maricopa Community College System.

“The missing ingredient in K-12 technology initiatives is a modern education platform to virtually extend the classroom for teachers, students, administrators and parents,” said Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure.  “Canvas K-12 will make teaching easier, save teachers time and improve learning.”

Parent co-enrollment

Instructure saves teachers time and engages parents in education by co-enrolling parents in Canvas. Parents can opt for push notifications when their child misses an assignment or has a test scheduled. At any time, they can log in to view grades, see their child’s participation in forums and communicate effortlessly with the teacher.

“With Canvas K-12, when a teacher makes a change to the calendar or to class assignments, parents are automatically notified through an email, a text message or a Facebook notification,” said Brian Whitmer, Co-Founder and Vice President of Products at Instructure. “The days of teachers having to stuff backpacks with paper are over.”

Painless state standards

Canvas K-12 makes the reporting of state standards and common core objectives quick and easy. Instructure pre-populates Canvas with state standards and common core objectives, so teachers can simply select the objectives and align them with course assessments.

Actionable learning analytics

Learning analytics provides a powerful way to monitor student engagement, track activity and predict success. Canvas employs predictive profiles to proactively assist at-risk students and creates a dashboard to identify trends and compare individuals, classes and schools.

Availability

Canvas K-12 is a new cloud offering by Instructure for the 2012-2013 academic school year. Districts interested in Canvas K-12 should contact Instructure today to schedule a demo. In the meantime, teachers can begin using Canvas for free. For information, visit www.instructure.com/k12.

About Instructure:

Instructure is focused on helping institutions improve education through technology. Founded in 2008 by two computer science graduate students, Instructure builds Canvas―the only simple, open learning management system native to the cloud. Instructure services more than 100 post-secondary and K-12 educational institutions. Investors include OpenView Ventures Partners, EPIC Ventures and Tomorrow Ventures.

CONTACT:

Devin Knighton, Director of Public Relations, Instructure, +1-801-722-8187, [email protected]