Unitrends’ Cloud and Disaster Recovery Survey Reveals Data Loss Remains Stubbornly High

Unitrends, a Boston-based backup and continuity division of Kaseya, has released findings from its fifth annual Unitrends Cloud and Disaster Recovery Survey, comparing current trends with data from past years to reveal best practices for enterprise protection and DRaaS.

Since the survey’s inception, Unitrends has found that 30 percent of responding organizations report losing data as the result of a data center outage. This remains stubbornly high, even as new data protection tools have emerged such as cloud workloads, DRaaS, and greatly improved data backup and recovery appliances. More than 40 percent of respondents reported having a period of downtime in 2019.

The use of the cloud as a tool in data protection strategies has greatly increased over the last four years, according to the report. Sixty percent of responding organizations report using cloud features such as short-term data storage, cloud archiving, and/or DRaaS as a backup location. Of the 40 percent of organizations not currently using the cloud for data protection, 53 percent plan to adopt it within the next year. Companies are also increasingly protecting mobile workforce PCs and laptops using the cloud. And, for the first time in the life of the survey, protecting SaaS applications like Microsoft Office 365, G Suite and Salesforce with cloud-based backup made the list of the top five cloud-based data protection technologies deployed.

The most widely deployed role for the cloud in data protection is off-site data and file storage. The number of organizations reporting that they are required to protect over 100TB of data jumped from 11 percent in 2016 to 31 percent in 2019. The overall increase in data volumes requiring protection has prompted organizations to look for new strategies to control storage costs and reduce the capital expenses of physical storage devices.

More than 400 respondents from organizations of all sizes and industries took part in the survey, which additionally addresses recovery time objective (RTO), data loss, and the growing use of cloud-based DraaS.

Channel Impact^®
This year’s survey offers insights into the challenges and trends that IT departments and admins face when protecting data from downtime and disasters as data volume and importance grow. The findings also underscore the importance of cloud and DRaaS solutions as organizations continue to be tasked with protecting more and more data.