Survey Reveals the Need for Better DR

A survey of 300 IT professionals, commissioned by Quantum and conducted by Toluna, revealed some interesting – and disconcerting – information on IT organizations’ security threats and disaster recovery (DR) operations.

For example, every one of the 300 respondents reported at least one data security incident in the past year, with most common being virus attacks (cited by 43% of the IT professionals), followed by hardware corruption (40%).

The rest of the security-related incidents included accidental deletion (28%), operating system failure (27%), natural disaster (21%), lost/stolen devices (20%), hacking or other electronic breaches (19%), firmware corruption (16%) and break-ins (13%).

A surprising 87% of the survey respondents think that their data is vulnerable in the event of security-related incidents, with almost 50% of them reporting that their data is “somewhat” or “extremely” vulnerable and the other half saying that their data is “slightly” or “not at all” vulnerable.

The survey also revealed the business impact of security-related incidents. For example, it takes IT organizations on average 10.5 hours to resume normal operations after a security incident, with more than 25% reporting that it takes 11 hours or more and 13% reporting delays of at least 24 hours.

The survey also queried the companies about how they implement disaster recovery. About 37% of the respondents replicate to a DR site, 27% send media offsite and replicate to a disaster recovery site, and 22% only send media offsite.

“The most common mistake that people make is to not treat DR as being separate from backup and long-term archiving,” says Steve Whitner, a product marketing manager at Quantum. To improve DR practices and reduce security risks, Whitner advises using disk-based deduplication for cost-efficient replication.

The survey also asked users about their backup practices. Almost half (47%) use a combination of disk and tape for backup, while 40% rely solely on disk and 13% only use tape for backup.

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