Only half of industrial firms can recover quickly
1 min read
With only half of industrial firms confident they could recover quickly from a disaster, according to a suvey by Acronis, business continutity is at risk.
Despite last year showing record levels of environmental, economic and political upheaval, the Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index 2012 findings suggests that industrial companies are still investing inadequately in data protection.
Astonishingly, the figures for manufacturing reveal that only 53% of organisations are confident they could recover fast.
David Blackman, general manager Northern Europe and MEA for Acronis, points that the global downturn is forcing manufacturers to focus on cost-reduction and to do more with less resources.
This, he says, could explain why nearly half (45%) of those surveyed cited lack of budget and IT resources as the key challenges. One in 10 (11%), he adds, said they spend nothing on backup and DR, while a quarter stated that they don't have the support of senior business executives.
Blackman makes the point that in a highly competitive sector, where the tolerance for any downtime is almost zero, its concerning that only 45% say they would not suffer substantial downtime in the event of a serious incident or natural disaster.
"The pressures on the industrial sector are escalating. It has a reputation for quality management, optimisation and automation, yet it's clear that their backup and DR strategies are not keeping up with the rising adoption of virtualisation," states Blackman.
"Organisations in the industrial sector need to embrace new technology to help them consolidate and standardise their backup and DR plan," he continues.
"In doing so, confidence levels will rise and IT managers' roles will become easier."
Blackman points to new technologies, such as virtualisation and cloud services, which should bring efficiencies to manufacturers needing to update their DR systems, but are also bringing new challenges to IT departments.
Two thirds (67%) of industrial firm's IT managers surveyed believe their greatest challenge in a hybrid environment is moving data between physical, virtual and cloud environments.
One in four (26%) have virtualised 50% or more of their production servers and this figure is set to grow by 30% in the next 12 months. Despite this growth, many are still putting their data at risk, with nearly 40% confirming they only back up virtual servers at monthly or irregular intervals.