U.S. SMBs Lag In Disaster Recovery Readiness

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Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in the United States ranked 10th out of 13 countries in their ability to bounce back from an IT disaster, trailed only by peers in Australia, France, and Italy, according to a new study.

One in three U.S. firms reported having no disaster recovery plan in place, a key factor in the country's low ranking in the study. Budget and resource concerns topped the list of reasons why. Older infrastructure could also be a key factor behind the ranking.

"It appears, based on our experience with our customers, that many U.S.-based companies have more legacy infrastructure than some of their European or Asian counterparts," said Jason Donahue, CEO of Acronis. "Consequently, the IT environments that they are managing can be more complex."

Donahue said that complexity was likely one of the reasons for the low ranking of U.S. SMBs. He also noted that cultural and language factors probably played a role in how respondents answered questions in the survey. Regions where English is the primary language -- the U.S., U.K., and Australia -- fared relatively poorly.

"The perception of fear around security threats is highest in English language," Donahue said. He attributed that to the proliferation of hacking and viruses aimed at English-language sites, and said it also may have played a role in survey responses.

IT managers at smaller businesses in Germany and the Netherlands checked in with the highest overall level of confidence in their backup and recovery strategies. SMBs in those countries reported clearly documented policies and procedures for disaster planning and recovery, with Switzerland joining them in the top three in that category. Smaller German firms appear particularly well-prepared, with nearly 70% believing they would not suffer substantial downtime in the event of an IT incident.

Not surprisingly, the most confident SMBs are also the ones that have high levels of boardroom support for backup and recovery plans. German and Dutch SMBs reported the highest rates of executive buy-in for disaster preparedness planning: Nearly 75% of German respondents believed they had support at the top levels of their company, while 69% of Dutch managers reported the same, putting them first and second in that category. Less than half of U.S. firms believed they had executive-level support for disaster planning.

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Budget and resource allocations were also a key factor. SMBs in Norway earmark 17% of their IT spending for backup and disaster recovery, tops in the survey. Swedish firms set aside 16%, the second largest slice of the resource pie. The top overall countries in the study -- Germany and the Netherlands -- spend roughly 13 to 14% of their IT budget on backup and recovery, compared with 10% in the United States. Donahue noted that while Asian regions fared fairly well in the overall rankings, they did so with modest budget allocations.

The report, "The Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index: 2011," included 3,000 SMBs across a range of industries. Each had fewer than 1,000 seats in their organization. The inaugural study was commissioned by backup and recovery vendor Acronis and performed by independent firm Ponemon Institute, and will be conducted annually going forward.

The study's statistics generally jive with a recent Symantec survey, which found that half of SMBs have no disaster recovery plan in place.

Though disaster plans certainly vary around the world, SMBs everywhere appeared to agree that hybrid IT environments create one of the biggest backup and recovery challenges: 68% of all respondents said that managing data across physical, cloud, and virtual environments was the toughest test in disaster preparedness.

"The hybrid world is a complicated one," Donahue said, adding that firms with more multifaceted environments generally had lower levels of confidence in their disaster preparedness. On average, SMBs in the study were using between two and three different options for backup and recovery operations -- three-quarters of respondents said they would prefer to deploy a single solution across all environments.

That challenge appears set to grow in the year ahead: Respondents across all regions reported that 16% of their IT infrastructure was cloud-based at the end of 2010, but they expect that to nearly double -- to 30% -- in 2011.

Donahue said backup redundancy -- "backups of your backups" -- is a key catalyst for cloud adoption. While some SMBs prefer to keep their primary backup onsite to reduce recovery time, Donahue said they often don't have the multiple data centers -- more common in larger enterprises -- necessary for redundancy.

"We're seeing that as, by far, the main driver," Donahue said.