Axcient, a cloud-based Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) provider, has announced the results of an independent survey that investigates the current state of backup and disaster recovery with SMBs, essentially focused on evaluating the impact of cloud backup solutions.

Conducted by market research company Dimensional Research and commissioned by Axcient, the study, questioned 453 IT professionals across US and Canada, to capture data on current trends and experiences with business backup and recovery. The online survey carried out in October 2014 saw professionals included IT executives, IT team managers, hands-on IT professionals and consultants, and represented a wide range of industry verticals, working at companies with 50 and 1,000 employees.

“Complete backup and protection is imperative for all companies, regardless of size,” explained Diane Hagglund, senior research analyst at Dimensional Research. “Given the staggering benefits of cloud-based backup and recovery solutions demonstrated in this survey, there is clear value in fully transitioning to a single, comprehensive cloud-based solution. Although cloud-based backup and recovery is still early in adoption, the recovery market is ripe for innovation, and cloud is the next frontier. I look forward to seeing how this market grows in the coming years.”

Key findings of the survey chart the following findings:

Backup is critical, but incomplete for most organizations

• Unscheduled downtime has significant business implications
• Applications matter: mid-size companies are backing data and critical applications as well
• Backup has moved beyond just mission-critical, but there are still gaps

Major business interruptions do happen, and IT is held responsible

• Major IT failures are a fact of life; especially for small companies
• Only 7 percent were very confident that they could recover operations within two hours
• Recovery is very disruptive to the IT team
• Mid-level IT staff are held responsible for lost data
• 50 percent say someone could lose their job if data is lost

Fragmented backup tools cause significant problems

• 90 percent of SMBs have multiple backup and recovery tools
• Most have backup and recovery tools with duplicate functionality
• More than half use different tools to back up physical and virtual servers
• Multiple tools are needed to support all environment backup
• 91 percent report challenges using multiple backup and recovery tools
• 71 percent report using multiple backup tools can increase risk

Cloud recovery is desirable, with a growing market

• One-third use cloud-based backup and recovery
• 89 percent see value in cloud-based disaster recovery
• 74 percent use a non-cloud based secondary site for recovery
• 79 percent of those with a non-cloud secondary site would make a change if they had resources

The entire Dimensional Research survey report can be accessed here.

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(Image credit: Axcient)