One year after Queensland floods, a third of local businesses still have no offsite backup: Acronis

Acronis's Karl Sice

Despite Australian businesses now feeling more confident in their backup and disaster recovery plans than they did before, a recent Acronis survey has also found that one-third of local companies still have no off-site backup strategy.

According to survey, titled 2012 Acronis Global Disaster Recovery (DR) Index, Australia joins the US and UK. in businesses around the world whose confidence about their ability to back up and recover data and IT systems following a disaster has grown.

While the three regions reported below average confidence levels for the second consecutive year, with Australia scoring the lowest of the three, Acronis did find that Australia’s confidence has more than doubled in 2011 by 136 per cent.

Additionally, businesses in Australia are 36 per cent more confident that their backup and DR operations will not fail, an increase Acronis Pacific General Manager, Karl Sice, attributes to Australia, just like Japan, having recently dealt with a natural disaster.

“The survey findings suggest that the natural disasters of 2011 have been a catalyst for positive change when it comes to most businesses testing their backup and DR operations,” Sice said.

However, Sice is quick to point out that several “strategic-level negatives,” such as executive refusing to buy-in and adopt multiple, disjointed solutions, persist as businesses come to grips with the ways to protect and secure business critical digital assets.

The breakdown of the local confidence results included 22 percent of respondents being more confident that they had boardroom support, 32 per cent that they had enough resources, and 39 per cent that they had the necessary technologies.

One would imagine that the flooding that Queensland experienced in early 2011 would convince many businesses of the importance of data back up and recovery, though the reality is that over a third, or 36 per cent, of Australian companies still have not implemented an off-site backup strategy,

This number has remained the same as the previous year, a phenomenon Sice attributes to the lingering "it won't happen to us" mindset and the underlying negative connotations behind the concepts of backup and DR.

“Nearly a third, or 28 per cent, of all the Australian companies are still using more traditional method of physically backing up on-site instead of automating off-site backups,” Sice said.

As this traditionally form of backing up is typically done on either a tape or disk backup before it is taken off-site each day, Sice highlights that there is a chance of human error occurring, as it is usually an individual employee that is responsible for and remembering to carry out this task.

Other key findings in the report included SMBs worldwide being 14 per cent more confident overall compared to the previous year, 66 per cent of businesses checking their backup and disaster recovery plans more regularly, and system downtime found to be costing each firm on average over $US366,000 a year.

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