Snap shot findings are: 

• UK business is spending 11% of IT spend backup and DR year on year
• 40% UK businesses feel business executives are not supportive of backup and DR.
• A typical UK SMB creates almost 38TB of fresh data each year.
• In the UK 64% blame human error as the commonest cause of downtime.
• Average system downtime is 2.4 days costing UK business £227,538 pa in lost productivity.

The 2012 Acronis Global Disaster Recovery (DR) Index, shows UK businesses on average 17% more confident in their backup and DR capabilities compared to the previous year’s result.

Key to this rise is a perceived improvement in having the right resources (tools/environment), technologies and procedures in place. Confidence in these alone risen by at least a third or more in the past year.

"But," notes Blackman "With the UK sitting in a miserable 11th position, it’s evident that UK businesses still have a long way to go when it comes to improving their backup and DR.”

He also highlights that in the first year that the BRIC countries are added to the Index, India has made it into 9th place, Japan’s confidence has increased, and Scandanavia, Nordics, Netherlands and the Swiss are all ranking well.

“We believe that in 2012 small to medium sized companies will stop talking about it and actually start to virtualise their IT infrastructure. Its potential to help companies get the most out of their existing server and storage continues to be at the forefront of the IT debate,’ says Blackman, who notes.

CONFLICT AND COLLABORATION IN A HYBRID WORLD
If 2011 was disastrous, 2012 could be a year of combined conflict and collaborations in organisations. Virtualisation is becoming common practice.  Key questions are who owns the virtual data, and who is responsible for backup & recovery? As the use of virtual servers for business-critical applications grows, data protection will become a big issue.

2012 is the year when administrators from all sized organisations need to accept the hybrid world is here to stay. The 100% virtual network will remain utopian. Even the most forward-thinking SMBs will be hard-pressed to top a 90% virtualisation rate. Hybrid environments will flourish and we will see a shift to more vendors developing multi-hypervisor and multi-environment solutions. Companies need to make sure they have one backup and DR solution to protect their hybrid world.

Acronis is also predicting that 2012 will be the year Microsoft Hyper-V will wow the SMB audience and grow virtualisation customer numbers. Cost, new features and its SMB market share make this possible.