The findings of a new Computing survey, sponsored by SunGard Availability Services, paint a worrying picture of organisations that are not in control of their information, unsure of their data protection obligations and unable to recover their critical data and systems within the required timeframe.
- Nearly 7% of UK enterprises back up their data only every few days, or periodically – an extraordinary admission in today’s information economy.
- Astonishingly, 18% of senior IT strategists within medium to large UK enterprises answered “Don’t know” when asked what data regulations govern their business.
It should be said that these failings cannot necessarily be laid at the door of the it department whose hardpressed staff are having to accommodate phenomenal data growth, equipped only with multiple legacy systems and a budget that is insufficient to tackle the root cause of the problem.
Putting the results in context, the survey’s author notes that whereas ‘the old economy’ was rooted in global infrastructures and distribution networks that evolved over centuries and were unlikely ever to fail completely, our high-speed information age of social networking, e-commerce and mobile communications has sprung up in less than two decades!
The study concludes that replication could be the solution – but points out that replicating an inefficient, multi-vendor it infrastructure merely magnifies the problem. Furthermore, up until now it has been an expensive option, affordable only by large, cash-rich enterprises. However, cloud computing: infrastructure, applications and computing platforms delivered as a pay-per-use service – brings replication within reach of all businesses.
As Replication as a Service follows the cloud computing model of renting on-demand services rather than maintaining a duplicate it infrastructure, the cost switches from being a capex to opex, added to which customers pay only for what they need. For this reason, it is estimated that Replication as a Service can result in savings of nearly 40% on traditional replication.
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