EMC conducts Disaster Recovery Survey 2012IT Business »
Company polled 1,000 companies in Middle East, Turkey, Morocco
Eighty-two percent of organisations surveyed are not very confident that they can fully recover their IT systems after a disaster, according to a new survey of 1,000 companies in the Middle East, Turkey and Morocco by EMC.
Published Tuesday, 8 May 2012
By Georgina Enzer
Eighty-two percent of organisations surveyed are not very confident that they can fully recover their IT systems after a disaster, according to a new survey of 1,000 companies in the Middle East, Turkey and Morocco by EMC.
‘The Disaster Recovery Survey 2012: Middle East, Turkey and Morocco’ survey also found that Sixty-four percent of those surveyed have lost data and/or suffered systems downtime in the last year.
Additionally, 37% of organisations claim they need at least one day or more to become fully operational again, and on average organisations suffered from two days of downtime.
“The results of the survey have demonstrated a real need to rethink approaches to backup and recovery across the Middle East, Turkey and Morocco. Increasingly, electronic information and the systems associated with that data is a key asset to the health and success of most organisations, yet this survey shows that many are not fully prepared to recover either their systems or data in the event of an IT failure or a more extreme situation. In a tough economic climate, the impacts on productivity, revenue and customer confidence can have serious negative consequences to the longevity of an organisation. EMC’s suggestion to all businesses is to ensure they have a well thought-out, strategic approach to backup and recovery that utilises the next-generation solutions now available. This will help protect them from day-to-day outages as well as more severe incidents at a better total cost of ownership than dated technologies like tape or CD-ROM,” said Nazim Fraijat, director of Backup, Recovery & Archiving, EMC Turkey Emerging Africa and Middle East.
Hardware failure (55%), software failure (40%) and security breaches (36%) were cited as the primary causes of data loss and downtime and loss of employee productivity is the most likely consequence of data loss and downtime (43%).
Fifty-two percent of organisations who store a backup copy offsite still use tape for disaster recovery, while 48% rely on CD-ROM to recover after a disaster. Seventy-three percent of organisations using tape want to replace it. Faster backups (55%), increased security (39%), and speed of data recovery and systems restore (36%) were cited as the top reasons to replace tape.
“Backup and recovery is one of the most important aspects of a business’ operations, yet it is all too often overlooked. EMC’s research is intended to highlight the consequences poor backup and recovery planning can have on businesses in the Middle East, Turkey and Morocco. It is clear from these results that businesses need to be just as aware of the disruption that can be caused by everyday failures as well as by malicious activities and larger scale disasters. Regardless of the causes of IT disruption, businesses need to be certain they have the right systems in place to react quickly and ensure their operations are not affected for long,” said Said Akar, district manager for South Gulf, EMC.
According to EMC, these findings highlight the need for backup transformation to next-generation backup and recovery solutions to ensure continued business operations in the event of a natural disaster, malicious activity or more routine and common disruptions to IT systems.
In response to such incidents, improving security is seen as key with 44% of businesses having improved physical security and 43% digital security, this despite the fact that security breaches were the third most common cause of data loss and downtime. Meanwhile, 37% of respondents stated that they have reviewed and changed procedures for IT systems backup and disaster recovery following an incident.
Furthermore, 29% of organisations increased their spending in backup and recovery after a disruption. This is against a backdrop where 34% of organisations surveyed did not feel they were spending enough on backup and recovery. On average, the research found that businesses across the region are spending on average 7.48% of their IT budgets on backup and recovery.
Systems failure resulted in, on average, nearly two lost working days for each of the businesses in the survey. Based on an average eight hour working day, this is the equivalent of 32,000 man-hours lost for a company employing approximately 2,000 employees. Additionally, each organisation lost an average of 133GB of data during a 12 month period. Given that 1MB of data is approximately the equivalent of 25 email documents in size, losing 133GB of data would be the equivalent of losing 3.325 million emails.
The research has also highlighted that businesses are not protecting valuable customer data, with only 23% having a disaster recovery plan in place for CRM applications. Only 22% of organisations who have a disaster recovery plan stated that they would need CRM applications to be up and running immediately following a downtime scenario, despite the fact that customer confidence was ranked as the second most important impact of downtime.
Focusing on the UAE, the research revealed that 78% of companies surveyed in the region are not very confident they can fully recover their systems or data following downtime. Additionally, 63% of businesses in the UAE reported having experienced data loss or systems downtime in the last 12 months, with 43% citing hardware failure as the leading cause. The major impact of data loss or systems downtime on UAE businesses was given as a loss of employee productivity by 37% of respondents. While only 36% of businesses in the UAE are using disk-based storage, 46% are still using tape. However, 75% of organisations would like to move away from using tapes for backup, with 59% citing faster backups as the key reason for doing so.
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