Common Backup Blunders

An industry independent study of leading IT consultants found 88 percent have some type of backup and recovery strategy, but only 39 percent believe they are actually prepared for a large-scale disaster or outage.

The study, commissioned by BUMI (Backup My Info!) questioned 100 IT consultants in Q4 2014 regarding their backup and recovery tools, initiatives and main concerns. Across the board it is clear the business recovery is not well managed.

"Confidence in restoring data spanned a broad range," according to the press release. "79 percent expected the timeline to be within hours and 19 percent indicated it would require several days. Approximately 2 percent had no confidence their data would be restored correctly at all."

At the root of all backup issues seems to be the "set and forget" mentality. Checking on backups is not a common part of the IT workflow, nor is looking for issues that may arise in a recovery process.

Some findings from the study include:

- 44 percent check client backups for errors daily, versus 15 percent weekly, 21 percent monthly and 8 percent annually. The remaining 13 percent never check.

- 19 percent of the IT professionals surveyed resolve backup errors in less than an hour, 52 percent said within a day, 25 percent within a week, and 4 percent ignore them completely (!).

- Email platforms, SQL databases and Microsoft Office files are the top three applications that take priority focus of an organization’s backup and recovery operation, they are the first to be recovered.

- The top three decision criteria for selecting a backup and recovery vendor are: data security, technical service and support, and technology features and functionality.

[For the ultimate enterprise backup checklist, read: 3 Things You Can't Put Off On World Backup Day] Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio