Venyu Blog

The evidence is mounting and it looks like we made the right choice after all in getting into data backup as a service.

Forrester Research has just released a survey of 1250 information technology managers that found about 60 percent of them are “interested, deploying, plan to deploy or already have deployed some form of online data backup as a service.”

Among the results:

• Six percent of small and medium-sized businesses, and seven percent of enterprises, already have adopted backup as a service.
• Three percent of SMBs and seven percent of enterprises report they are upgrading or expanding their backup “as a service” programs.
• Eleven percent of SMBs and 11 percent of enterprises have plans to implement, with four percent of both enterprises and SMBs saying they plan to do so within the next 12 months.
• 40 percent of SMBs and 36 percent of enterprise respondents said they were interested in such services, but have not current plans to adopt.

Elaborating on these findings the lead Forrester Research analyst, Rachel A. Dines, disclosed that large enterprises are mainly interested in online backup in order to back up corporate PCs as well as PCs and small servers at remote branch offices rather than replacing core data center backups of mission-critical and business-critical servers.

On the other hand, the survey’s results found that enterprises with smaller data capacities favor online backup service for both PCs and critical servers are first conducted locally to a disk appliance and a second copy of the data is later vaulted to the vendor’s data center.

Market segmentation data developed by the survey found that online PC backup and online server backup found their footing for businesses with less than a thousand employees with organizations in the mid-range of 1,000 to 4,999 employees favoring a hybrid approach that backs up data locally to disk and then a second copy to a vault.

As SMBs grow and their IT departments evolve, it’s the cloud — whether public, private or hybrid — that will benefit them most as they ramp up their business in the short-run in order to achieve long-term success.