The Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index 2012 Fact Sheet

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.