The survey was announced at the recent AWS reinvent, an annual Amazon show that this year was completely sold out.
“Analysis of the results indicate that 88% of the IT pros surveyed admitted that they have lost data due to hardware failure, data corruption, malware or accidental deletion of a file. Even more surprisingly, despite this high incidence of data loss, 38% have never tested the recoverability of their backed-up data and 47% wait up to a month or more to back up,” CloudBerry said.
Many of these problems are due to the use of older backup technologies. Tape is particularly problematic and error prone.
One problem is most shops don’t test their tapes, with some experts finding that the vast majority of SMBs, some 90%, don’t test tape. Now wonder more than half of all tape restores fail in some way. In fact, experts find failure rates from 42% to 54% or more
CloudBerry also sees trouble with tape, and its survey of 100 IT pros shows that a mere 5% still use tape.
Security is another problem as 32% of those asked didn’t know if their backups were encrypted or even password protected, CloudBerry found.
The Cloud Route
The cloud can solve many of these issues since the vendor is the one that manages the backup and insures the recovery. And there is no hardware to buy and maintain. Some 93% of those surveyed think that in five years the majority of data will be in the cloud.
As a cloud vendor, CloudBerry sees the cloud as the way to go. “CloudBerry Lab provides cloud-based backup and file management services to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). CloudBerry’s offerings include powerful, easy-to-use backup management capabilities and military-grade encryption using customer-controlled keys. Customers can choose to store their backup data with more than 20 online storage providers, including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, HP Cloud, Rackspace, Softlayer and others,” the company explained.
Amazon itself has backup for AWS, a technology highly regarded by Gartner.
Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Storage Services
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a pioneer in public cloud storage services, having offered an object storage service for more than eight years. AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) is accessible through RESTful API. AWS also offers a persistent block storage service, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), which serves as virtual machine (VM) storage; and a long-term archival storage, Amazon Glacier,” Gartner wrote earlier this year.
