Nearly nine in 10 small to medium businesses have experienced “cost-related challenges” with backing up and recovering virtual servers, according to the latest industry report from virtualisation provider Veeam.

These fiscal frustrations primarily included ongoing management costs, backups requiring too much storage and expensive licensing models, according to the report.

Conducted in November and December 2012 by independent market research specialists Vanson Bourne, the report surveyed C-level executives or higher from the US, UK, Germany and France.

And the underlying theme from the research was that, in spite of how important it is to back up VMs and servers, it’s not a walk in the park.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as is the way of these things, the research from a virtualisation provider advocates virtualisation as the primary solution, yet the statistics on their own still make interesting reading.

The most eye-opening of the lot was that more than half (55 …