The latest survey from cloud provider Databarracks has found that small businesses are lagging behind when it comes to disaster recovery planning and cloud exit strategies.<\/p>\n
Only 30% of smaller businesses had a business continuity plan in place, compared to 54% of medium organisations and 73% of large businesses. The findings, which appear in Databarracks’ annual Data Health Check report (registration link here<\/a>), showed a poor uptake in smaller businesses for now, but added that disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) was either the most or second most likely service to be adopted – across all business sizes.<\/p>\n The report firstly examined the state of cloud computing across businesses. The majority of companies (25%) still use only one cloud computing service, yet a solid amount use two (23%). The numbers trail off afterwards (three cloud services 7%, five cloud services plus 4%), yet as the report notes: “More cloud services are being used, but adoption is gradual and often discrete.”<\/p>\n The most popular cloud service was backup as a service (BaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) with 21% of the vote, followed by IaaS, PaaS (18%) and DRaaS (16%).<\/p>\n Smaller organisations aren’t putting disaster recovery plans in place, or testing their plans if they do have them, but all organisations are at risk of losing data. Hardware failure (21%), software failure (19%) and good old fashioned human error (18%) were the key reasons for data loss. Not surprisingly, lack of time (35%) is cited as the biggest reason for firms not testing their plans.<\/p>\n For larger organisations, 22% listed human error as the main cause of data loss over the past 12 months, compared to just 6% of smaller firms. 23% of small organisations have no data retention policy, compared to 3% of large organisations.<\/p>\n The overall verdict is clear: disaster recovery needs to be part of the process at any level.<\/p>\n “Disasters don’t discriminate when it comes to the size of your organisation,” said Peter Groucutt, Databarracks MD, adding: “And it’s not just the media-worthy incidents such as cyber-attacks or natural disasters that are a risk.<\/p>\n “There needs to be an attitude change. Disaster recovery is not only available and affordable to organisations of all sizes, it’s absolutely essential.”<\/p>\n After cloud provider Nirvanix shut down in September last year<\/a>, Gartner analyst Kyle Hilgendorf noted how the research firm’s advice on cloud exit strategies were falling on deaf ears.<\/p>\n “I suspect it is because cloud exits are not nearly as sexy as cloud deployments – they are an afterthought,” wrote Hilgendorf<\/a>. “These functions rarely receive the attention they deserve in IT, except for immediately following major events.”<\/p>\n The Databarracks study shows that companies are starting to pay attention to this – but it will take a little while to see through first.<\/p>\n Read more: Disaster Recovery as a Service: Can small businesses now benefit?<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n