Backup volumes in many organisations have grown so large they are causing business disruption by tying up systems, storage, and network capacity and hogging valuable IT resources according to new research.

59 percent of IT executives complained that the volume of data they are forced to backup is disrupting business operations or will do so eventually according to a survey of 472 IT executives in the UK and North America. And the problem is not going away, with an overwhelming 93 percent saying that their routine backup volumes are continuing to increase. The problem is ‘eating up’ IT resources for long periods with 37 percent admitting that daily backups of primary data now take them over nine hours and 19 percent over twelve hours.

84 percent of those polled in the survey, which is part of BridgeHead Software’s Annual Information Lifecycle Management Audit, felt they could benefit by reducing the volume of data they routinely back up. Among the chief advantages highlighted were:

* Less IT time devoted to backup and other business continuity processes (69 percent)
* A reduction in the impact of backup and replication on network utilisation and capacity (60 percent)
* A reduction in disk resources devoted to data snapshotting, replication and mirroring (58 percent)
* Reduced disruption to the live application environment (45 percent)

One of the most effective ways of reducing the pressure on backups is to take information that is static or seldom accessed and archive it off primary storage systems according to Tony Cotterill CEO of BridgeHead Software:

“61 per cent of organisations in our survey admit that between 30 to 50 percent of data on their primary disk is unlikely to be accessed ever again, yet they are squandering time and resources on backing up and replicating this big chunk of static data. It’s a very poor use of resources.”

BridgeHead’s research reveals that many organisations are starting to use archiving for specific types of data such as e-mails, motivated by compliance and disaster recovery. And a lot of archiving activity is currently championed by finance and other business departments outside of IT’s control.

But to have a major impact on backup volumes, BridgeHead believes there needs to be an IT-driven move away from point solutions or isolated archive appliances towards taking an organisation wide approach with enterprise archiving solutions that allow IT to take back control by letting them archive all data types across the whole organisation from a single point.

“If you can take an organisation-wide approach to archiving, then the volume of data you’re taking off the primary store will start to reach a critical mass that will help call a halt to increasing backup volumes,” said Cotterill.

•Date: 18th October 2007• Region:UK/N.America •Type: Article •Topic: BC statistics
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