Customers Discuss Protection

BOSTON -- Although the tragedies of 9/11 brought disaster recovery and business continuance into the mainstream of IT industry topics, customers still struggle with a lack of money and staff to guard against unforeseen business interruptions, according to the results of an Aberdeen Group benchmark survey.

Close to two-thirds of the roughly 100 survey respondents cited disaster recovery or business continuance as their top data-protection driver.Traditional backup/restore and legal discovery came right behind, each named by 53% of respondents as one of three key drivers.

The report's key findings also show that data protection, as a practice, has evolved since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. About 30% of respondents say their companies have implemented well defined data protection strategies within the last two-to-five years; another 16% have deployed one within the last two years. Furthermore, at least 43% of the survey respondents said they are "still evaluating" whether to implement a strategic plan to move toward a tape-less environment while just 7% have instituted tape-less strategies.Twenty-one percent said they have no plans to move toward tape-less data- protection strategies.

The Data Protection Benchmark Report, which details the findings, provides a broad look at the myriad technologies storage customers have deployed since 2000, including Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL), Continuous Data Protection (CDP), Disk-to-Disk Backup (D2D), and Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape backup (D2D2T).

"Data protection technologies that have proven to be faithful and effective are still the mainstream for many corporations when it comes to protecting their information," said Sonia R. Lelii, Aberdeen Research Analyst and the report's author. "These tools are being used in spite of the array of new and compelling solutions that have flooded the market."

Aberdeen Group Inc.