Backup and Recovery for Small and Medium Businesses

An Expert Perspective from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)

Iron Mountain: ESG has been surveying the backup and recovery practices of small and medium businesses - or SMBs. In the past the industry focus has been on large enterprises. As leading analysts for storage and information management, why is ESG studying this group right now?

John McKnight: Data protection strategies are crucial for all companies today because of information security threats, disaster recovery concerns, regulatory compliance and the critical role of information in all business.

Iron Mountain: Can you give us some background on your research?

John McKnight: We defined SMBs as companies with less than $500 million in annual revenues. Of the 186 companies we interviewed, 61 percent had annual revenues under $50 million, 25 percent had annual revenues of $50-249 million, and 14 percent had annual revenues of $250-499 million.

These companies represented 20 different industries. But the people we talked to in these businesses - storage and IT professionals - reported common data protection realities and challenges.

Iron Mountain: Can you summarize these?

John McKnight: First, data is rapidly increasing in volume. Second, it's also growing in importance to day-to-day operations, and so, third, it must be protected. We also learned that over 80 percent of SMBs run incremental backups at least once a night, and 84 percent perform a full backup at least once a week.

Interviewees also mentioned three data protection challenges related to these circumstances:

1. Shrinking backup windows. Because of data growth, backups are taking too long.
2. Data protection gaps. SMBs worry that current backup schedules aren't providing adequate protection.
3. Legacy technology. Their tape-based backup and recovery solutions are prone to long recovery times, variable reliability, and errors resulting from manual handling.

Iron Mountain: What are SMBs planning to do about these challenges?

John McKnight: Besides increasing backup frequency, SMBs are looking at new disk-to-disk backup technologies, such as tape libraries, simple disk-based backup targets, snapshot, and continuous capture. These reduce backup and restore time, improve reliability because they eliminate manual handling and offer more efficient staff utilization.

However, there were common obstacles to deploying new technologies: cost, too many competing initiatives with not enough IT staff to cover them, and technical complexity.

Iron Mountain: What can SMBs do to improve their data protection?

John McKnight: ESG recommends SMBs use fully managed protection services from backup services providers for a monthly fee. These services address two obstacles: the cost of a new backup and restore solution and the lack of technical staff.

Here's what we think SMBs should look for in choosing a backup service:

• Advanced technology. Backup service providers can offer an advanced data protection infrastructure with the latest disk-based solution. They also continually upgrade their technology.
• Rapid, reliable recovery. Look for fast, granular, disk-based restores through a simple, self-service interface. This will minimize manual intervention, which causes many backup and restore problems.
• Application-specific expertise - for backing up email applications such as Microsoft Exchange.
• 24x7 monitoring. Find a vendor who will validate backups, alert you when problems occur, and help you resolve them.
• Off-site, off-line, out-of-reach data protection. Some vendors both keep your data online for a period - for fast, everyday restores - and copy it to tape and vault it off-line at a secure site away from threats like viruses and hostile employees.
• Highly-specific offerings. The market includes solutions for specific requirements - such as backup for servers, backup for desktops, and digitally archiving emails and instant messages to help comply with regulations.

Iron Mountain: Companies interested in other storage and data protection trends and technology as well can contact ESG at http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com