News

Poll Snapshot: Backup/Disaster Recovery Lagging for Cloud, Virtualization

Companies are beginning to address those concerns, a Zetta survey finds.

• By Keith Ward
• 03/23/2015

In some ways, backing up an IT environment is easier than ever; the rise of virtualization and cloud computing are two of the key reasons why. Ironically, they also make backup more complicated than ever, since data can be on the move regularly.

A new survey provides a glimpse of those changes, both where the industry stands now and where it's headed. Cloud-based backup/disaster recovery (DR) vendor Zetta undertook the survey, trying to determine what a "typical" environment looks like. The chief finding is that slightly more than half of the 400 enterprises polled -- 52 percent -- back up the "big three" types of data: files, applications and servers.

The downside of that is that nearly half aren't protecting all their assets. However, the survey also found that among those planning to add more types of backup, 76 percent were adding server images, which is the foundation of virtualization.

Backup's close cousin, DR, is more common in environments; 97 percent of poll-takers reported having some form of DR in place. And although using the cloud for DR is still a small percentage (just 10 percent currently), that number is poised to jump; 31 percent of respondents are planning to add a new method of DR, and 52 percent of those will look to the cloud. In all, four types of DR were identified:

• On-premises
• Physical offsite, usually via tape backups
• On-premises plus cloud
• On-premises plus physical offsite.

The operating system (OS) in use in the vast majority of environments is Windows, with 95 percent of companies using it. Even though Windows dominates, it usually isn't alone, as 63 percent of respondents using more than one OS, typically Linux.

Those OSes are often virtualized, but at surprisingly low levels in the Zetta poll. Fewer than half reported virtualizing more than 70 percent of their servers; 34 percent have virtualized between 31-70 percent of their servers, while 19 percent have virtualized 30 percent or less of their servers.

The infographic from the survey is here.