Survey looks at data protection and recovery in Irish businesses
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- Published: Tuesday, 04 October 2016 07:36
Datapac, an Ireland-based ICT solutions provider, has published the results of a survey which finds that Irish businesses expect to wait an average of 40 hours to recover mission critical data that has been lost. The survey of 163 IT professionals in Ireland looked at how organizations are managing the increasing demands placed on their technology infrastructures and business continuity systems.
Datapac’s research found that the amount of data being stored by organizations has increased by an average of 37 percent over the past year. Despite this rapid growth in data volumes, 26 percent of Irish businesses surveyed admit they never carry out disaster recovery tests to ensure their data back-ups are recoverable.
In further analysis of IT resourcing and time management, the survey found that IT professionals spend 35 percent of their time managing day-to-day reactive incidents such as fixing IT hardware, software and printers. Three quarters (75 percent) of those surveyed believe that the amount of time their IT department spends tacking low-level reactive incidents is compromising their ability to add value to their organizations.
80 percent of Irish organizations are outsourcing the management and support of some ICT services, such as back-up, storage, security and print, to external managed service providers. The top three drivers for availing of managed services are limited IT resources (51 percent), ensuring greater security and compliance (44 percent) and cost savings (44 percent).
The survey found that Irish businesses are allocating an average of 28 percent of their annual IT budgets to managed service providers. This would appear to be low considering that the majority of respondents have both limited in-house resources and also wish to be freed up to add more strategic value.
Karen O’Connor, general manager service delivery, Datapac, commented: “The average length of time to recover mission critical data is unacceptably long at 40 hours. Delays of this magnitude will cause significant financial and reputational damage for most businesses in Ireland. Another worrying finding is that more than a quarter of businesses never carry our tests on their disaster recovery capabilities. With data volumes continuing to grow at pace and security threats becoming increasingly prevalent, these are problems that just won’t go away. We recommend that companies perform a full disaster recovery test at least once a year and more frequently for industry sectors with stricter compliance regulations and targets.”
