Data protection solution vendor Veeam Software has released the results of its first SMB Virtualization Data Protection report, and it concludes downtime can be costly for the average small and medium-sized business (SMB).
Intended to explore the impact of virtualization on SMBs’ data protection, backup and recovery strategies, some 500 SMBs in the U.S. and Eirope were surveyed. It concluded SMBs are experiencing significant issues with the cost, complexity and lack of capabilities protecting their data in virtual environments.
Some 85 per cent of respondents reported cost-related challenges with backup and recovery, while 83 per cent had issues with lack of capabilities and 80 per cent with complexity.
Among the other key findings: recovering an individual file can take up to 12 hours because 62 per cent of SMBs often have to recover more than just the one item they need, and 67 per cent of SMBs’ backup tools use agents, which can add to complexity, and 76% of those SMBs said they encounter problems such as difficulty managing agents, slow performance and frequent failure.
And failure can be costly. Some 41 per cent of respondents said downtime due to an IT failure costs them $150,000 or more an hour, or $600,000 per incident. And one third of SMBs don’t have their infrastructure backed up.
“More and more, SMBs are being subjected to the same IT challenges and business pressures as large enterprises,” said Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO of Veeam, in a statement. “As such, any disruption to their IT infrastructure can have severe consequences. This is why it’s particularly worrying that the vast majority of SMBs reported cost, complexity and capability challenges with backup and recovery. When you also consider that one in six recoveries simply don’t work, it’s clear that the issue of data protection is a ticking time bomb in the SMB community.”
