Data Backup & Recovery

Survey Says: Virtual Machine Backups Not Up to Snuff

The results of a recent survey of CIOs, commissioned by Veeam Software, are eye-opening. Only 68 percent of administrators are backing up their virtual server environments and less than 30 percent of IT organizations back up their entire virtual infrastructure. Sister site InfoStor has the story.

“A survey of 500 CIOs, commissioned by Veeam Software and conducted by Vanson Bourne, reveals some interesting trends in the virtual server space, specifically on the backup and recovery practices of IT organizations.

“For example, penetration of virtual servers is now approaching 50% in IT infrastructures (currently 42%), and since CIOs on average consider half of their servers to be “mission critical,” that means that virtual servers are poised to penetrate mission critical applications. And the 42% penetration today is expected to grow to 63% in the next two years.

“The No. 1 reason that IT organizations virtualize is to consolidate physical servers (71%), followed by improved disaster recovery (54%) and improved data protection (51%). Yet one of the primary gating factors to end-user adoption of virtual servers centers on fears relating to the ability to successfully back up and recover virtual machines (VMs). In fact, 44% of the survey respondents said that concerns regarding VM backup and recovery prevented them from virtualizing mission-critical workloads.”