Study: Companies willing to switch backup vendors for integrated recovery management
CA announced the results of a global study indicating that while most enterprise and SMB IT organizations are satisfied with their current backup product, 70% of them would consider switching to backup that is integrated with other key recovery management functions, including replication and continuous data protection (CDP). The study showed that key business objectives, backup integration pain and cost reduction initiatives are the top drivers behind their willingness to switch.
The study, conducted by TheInfoPro, interviewed 205 IT executives from SMB and enterprise companies around the world, including North America, Europe, Brazil and Japan. Respondents indicated that backup integration with CDP and replication are among the top three biggest pain points that would convince them to switch vendors. The research also showed that using the same vendor for an integrated backup and replication solution was the second most realistic backup cost reduction strategy behind centralizing backup management.
Business priorities that go beyond traditional backup
The study also revealed that business priorities require data protection beyond traditional backup, led by managing business continuity, quickly recovering data and applications and maintaining application availability – the drivers behind integrating CDP and replication with backup.
Criteria for critical business information protection and recovery
According to the study, top backup vendor selection criteria include the need to avoid costly server downtime, simplifying management, supporting backup and replication of virtual machines, protecting remote and branch office data, and meeting specific recovery time objectives (RTO). Conversely, the study showed that the lack of management support, staff limitations and difficulties with change are the biggest constraints in improving backup environments.
The study also pointed to disaster recovery testing as an important requirement in implementing a reliable disaster recovery plan and to backup and replication support for VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V as the most important virtualization support to businesses.