Whilst a third of those surveyed admitted that they had wholly virtualised their IT environments, over a quarter (26%) said that the biggest barrier to sign off on disaster recovery plans was a perception that it would be too expensive, with a similar amount (25%) admitting that expectation of any financial return was minimal.
The study, conducted by Timico, the business internet, hosting and communications service provider, gave a comprehensive insight into the disaster recovery habits of IT managers in the UK – and revealed that the channel is at risk of missing out on disaster recovery opportunities.
Timico’s DRaaS solution, available for re-sale in the channel, is a cloud-based and scalable service which negates the need to replicate a secondary environment – making it much cheaper and simpler to deploy than traditional disaster recovery services. DRaaS is also a pay-as-you-go service – meaning that businesses need not pay huge sums of money upfront.
It seems, however, that this message is not being communicated to decision makers, as the top objective for customers in the survey was meeting budget restrictions (35%) – something that DRaaS is perfectly suited to.
Darren Hilton, Director of Partner Services at Timico, said: “Ever since IT environments have been virtualised – disaster recovery has become an essential part of the IT manager’s remit. However, there’s still a perception that disaster recovery solutions are cumbersome and expensive – when in fact the cloud has allowed solutions which are cost-effective and easy to implement as well as safe and secure.
“This lack of knowledge presents the perfect opportunity for the channel, as it allows resellers to tap into a market which may believe disaster recovery just isn’t an option for them. Successful reselling is all about staying ahead of the curve – so it pays to keep pace with industry developments and relay these to the end users.”
The Timico survey also found that over 60% of SMEs had not yet rolled out any form of cloud-based back up within their business. Moving to the cloud negates the need for dual site replication, an option still favoured by 18% of those businesses questioned. Shockingly, despite the risks, a minority of respondents even admitted to never backing up their data.