According to Veeam’s third annual Virtualization Data Protection Report, every hour of data centre downtime costs an enterprise $324,793, which means that, on average, every downtime incident costs organizations at least $1.6 million.
Veeam Software, a provider of backup, replication and virtualization management solutions for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, sponsored the independent survey of 500 European and North American CIOs into the impact of virtualization on data protection, backup and recovery strategies.
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According to Veeam, the study found that enterprises are still not experiencing the full benefits that virtualization brings to data protection, with capabilities, complexity and cost all affecting implementations.
Among the key findings:
- 68% of CIOs feel that their backup and recovery tools will become less effective as the amount of data and servers in their organization grows.
- Recovery of virtual servers is only a little faster than that of physical servers, at five and six hours respectively. This is actually worse than in 2011, when recovery took four and five hours.
- Every hour of downtime costs an enterprise $324,793: meaning that downtime is, on average, costing organizations at least $1.6 million per incident.
- Regardless of recovery times, enterprises experience problems with more than 1 in 6 recoveries.
- 58 per cent of CIOs are planning to change their backup tool for virtual environments by 2014.
- Currently, virtual infrastructure accounts for 51% of enterprise servers, with this expected to grow to 63% in 2014.
“Recovery times have increased since 2011. This apparent loss of momentum in data protection comes down to two influences. First, virtual infrastructure is constantly growing: as well as forming the majority of IT infrastructure now, it will continue to grow in the future. Second, organizations are not updating their data protection tools and strategies to match. For example, the majority of enterprises still deploy agents for backup and recovery,” said Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO of Veeam Software, in a statement. “This approach works for physical environments but is unnecessary and ill-suited to the virtual infrastructure. Until organizations stop using a physical-world mind-set to view the technology, they will never be able to unlock its full potential.”