SMBs Grapple With Disaster Recovery, Backup Issues

by Nathan Eddy

Cost-related challenges with the backup and recovery of virtual servers cover three areas: high ongoing management costs, expensive licensing models, and backups either requiring or using too much storage.

This graph shows the time, measured in hours, it takes to recover virtual servers (in gray) and the time to recover physical servers (in green).

Currently, 63 percent of SMBs feel that their backup and recovery tools will become less effective as the amount of data and servers in their infrastructure continue to grow.

Forty-one percent of SMBs stated that the cost per hour of downtime for their business-critical servers that had not been protected by techniques such as replication was $150,000 or more. Gray represents unreplicated servers costing $150,000 or more per hour of downtime; green represents less than $150,000 per hour of downtime.

SMBs are still struggling with more granular recovery from virtual servers that should be more straightforward, often having to recover more than desired to reach a specific item.

The specialist e-discovery tools used for this are not aimed at the SMB market: 65 percent of SMBs feel that the cost of specialist e-discovery tools is prohibitively expensive.

The graph on the left shows the number of times per year SMBs experience problems attempting to recover from backups; on the right, it shows the percentage of recoveries that present problems.

A lack of opportunities to test backups may be one reason the chance of problems with backups is so high. Currently, the average SMB tests backups for recoverability every 3 months.

This graph shows the percentage of backup servers tested when monitoring for recoverability, with larger midmarket companies faring worse than smaller SMBs.

Eighty percent of SMBs said that they are experiencing complexity-related challenges with backup and recovery of virtual environments.