Over half of organisations are ‘very confident’ in their IT backup capabilities

First released 10 years ago, the Data Health Check surveys over 400 IT decision-makers on a range of topics relating to IT practices within their business. Notable highlights from this year’s survey include:

• Confidence in backup solutions has risen significantly since 2008. An 18 percentage point increase means 51 per cent of participants are now very confident in their backup capabilities.

• This increased confidence is against a backdrop of growing data volumes, with 29 per cent of organisations (from 12 per cent in 2008) handling over 100TBs of data.

• In 2008, 47 per cent of organisations had not encrypted their backup data. This fell to 33 per cent in 2018.

• The average frequency of restores has stayed fairly consistent over the years. Additionally, restore testing has decreased with those ‘not testing’ dropping from 20 per cent in 2008 to 15 per cent in 2018.

Commenting on these findings, Peter Groucutt, managing director of Databarracks, says:

“Considering macro trends in IT over the past 10 years – the explosion of data, ever increasing cyber threats, the emergence of cloud and with it the shift to greater mobile and remote working – it’s easy to see where strains are being placed on an organisation’s backup capabilities and why confidence might be shaken. Our findings show this is not the case, which is encouraging to see. More and more firms have a business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place and importantly, plans are being reviewed and regularly tested, which will breed confidence.”

Groucutt highlights other areas for organisations to address: “Despite more businesses encrypting backup data, a third of organisations not doing this is too high. Whether you’re backing up data to physical media like tape or disk, or whether you’re transferring data offsite, over the internet, the possibilities for it being intercepted are very real with serious ramifications for those at fault.

“Considering it from the perspective of GDPR, while not mandating the use of encryption in the regulation itself, it does require an organisation to demonstrate its approach to compliance. If an organisation chooses not to encrypt, then a business would need to demonstrate what alternative methods it uses to safeguard data or face severe penalties.”