Approximately half of all American businesses will have a tough time getting their data back after an unplanned outage and other mishaps, suggests a new survey from data protection specialist StorageCraft.
A solid data protection strategy and backup technology implementation is a top IT priority at most organizations. How else is a business supposed to recover from an unexpected server meltdown or the latest ransomware outbreak?
The StorageCraft study reveals that this critical safety net is looking a little tattered at many companies. More than half (51 percent) of the 510 U.S.-based IT decision makers surveyed by the firm said they had doubts about their ability to recover data immediately following a disaster or failure.
The firm discovered that 43 percent of organizations are having a tough time keeping up with storage growth, a figure that jumps to 51 percent for midsized and large companies with more than a $500 million in annual revenue.
Adding salt to the wound, they also expect the problem to keep getting worse. Those concerns are warranted.
According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index forecast, global IP traffic is expected to reach 278 exabytes per month in 2021, or 3.3 zettabytes for the entire year. Last year, the world’s businesses and internet users generated a total of 1.2 zettabytes of IP traffic.
Businesses IP traffic is poised to hit 45 exabytes per month in 2021, compared to 17.8 exabytes per month in 2016. Of course, all that data won’t just vanish into the ether. Much of it will winds up taking up precious storage capacity on servers and enterprise storage arrays.
Fifty-one percent of midsized and larger organizations also said more frequent backup schedules would be beneficial to their businesses. Unfortunately, their IT infrastructures can’t handle it. “Organizations are clearly struggling with massive data growth and their ability to ensure business continuity when faced with outages,” commented Douglas Brockett, president of StorageCraft, in prepared remarks.
Data backup system vendors have also been feeling some pain lately.
In September, IDC reported that the non-mainframe backup appliance market dropped 16.2 percent on an annual basis during the second quarter (Q2) of 2017. Vendors saw their sales slip from $868.9 million in Q2 2016 to $728.5 million.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enterprise Storage Forum. Follow him on Twitter .