The Gold Standard in disaster recovery DAVID BLACKMAN


General Manager of Northern Europe, Acronis


David Blackman, General Manager of Northern Europe, Acronis explains how the results of its Global Disaster Recovery Index show global business trends in disaster recovery.


Being fit for business is imperative for all organisations participating in a highly competitive global economy. This means being able to continue to operate in the event of IT failure or major disaster, whether man-made or natural. Regardless of their global location, IT managers share a common challenge – keeping their business-critical digital assets safe and sound.


With the adoption of virtualisation, and the ongoing shift towards the cloud, DR strategies are becoming more complex. The shift has seen companies adopting several different backup solutions at various points in time to manage their different environments. Clearly a hybrid world is a complex one.


Despite universal complexities, there is no global standard for backup and DR. A recent global study of 3000 IT managers, which was conducted by Acronis and research house The Ponemon Institute set out to create a global index that identified the attributes required for a business to have confidence in excelling at backup and DR.


The results revealed that while attitudes towards backup and recovery differ widely around the world, businesses everywhere want a single backup and recovery solution for physical, virtual and cloud environments.


The world has entered a period of unparalleled data growth that is putting unprecedented strain on IT infrastructure. Only a global perspective gives a true index, without it businesses are most likely to adopt the same processes, technologies and corporate styles as those closest to them and never learn anything. In athletic terms, it’s the difference between being a national 100m champion, or taking home gold for the 100m sprint at the Olympic Games.


The most confident: Germany and the Netherlands The results read like a typical games leader board. In top spot thanks to consistently achieving the best scores for confidence in backup and DR processes and procedures was Germany, closely followed by the Netherlands. With the strongest foundations


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for backup and DR operations, they have the best boardroom buy-in (73%/69%), the best controls and procedures (85%/77%) and the best-documented policies (85%/78%). As a result, they post the highest confidence scores when it comes to recovering quickly in the event of downtime (77%/85%), both more than 50% higher than average.


Closing confidently on the leaders: Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan


Closing confidently on the leaders is the APJ (Asia Pacific and Japan) region. Despite some major differences to the Index leaders, they are certainly the most confident regions when it comes to the belief that their backup and DR operations will work in the event of a serious incident


There are two areas of notable difference between APJ and the Index leaders. The first lies in how much of their overall IT budget is spent on backup and DR. The Germans (13%) and Dutch (14%) allocate more than twice as much of their overall IT budget to backup and DR than Singapore (6%), Hong Kong (5%) and Japan (7%).


Secondly, we can see a large difference in terms of how many businesses in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan spend nothing on backup and DR operations. In Germany and the Netherlands, almost every business has some kind of backup and DR budget. However, a surprising number of businesses in Singapore (41%), Hong Kong (44%) and Japan (40%) claim to allocate none of their IT budget to backup and DR. This comparative lack of budget for backup and DR seems to conflict with their initial high confidence in recovering quickly from a serious incident.


The Nordic middle ground


In the middle of the results board, sit the Nordic countries. The study found that Swedish and Norwegian businesses had very similar attitudes to backup and DR. While they generally scored just above average throughout the study, there were several aspects that made them stand out.


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