Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use backup and recovery solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today announced that financial institutions are lacking confidence in their backup and DR strategies with a third (33%) stating that they face substantial risk from downtime in the event of a serious incident or event.
According to a survey of 3,000 IT managers in SMBs across 13 different countries, the financial services sector is also a relatively slow adopter of new technologies such as virtualization and cloud services. Only a fifth (20%) of servers in the finance industry are virtualized today as opposed to a quarter (25%) in the industrial industry. And future outlook is similar with 42% of IT managers believing that by the end of 2011 over 50% of their servers will be virtualized, compared to 48% in the industrial industry. Not surprisingly, it sits ahead of the public sector where only 38% of IT managers looking to widespread virtual adoption in 2011.
The same is apparent in cloud services with finance businesses predicting that 28% of the IT infrastructure will be in the cloud by the end of the year, as opposed to 32% in industry. IT managers in the finance industry cite speed of recovery, security risks and workload complexity as the top three challenges facing cloud adoption. However, half of respondents (52%) agree that the cloud will enable lower operating costs.
Other key take aways from the finding include:
Backup strategy not comprehensive : Half (45%) of financial services organizations are only using file-based backups, meaning that their full systems including operating
systems and applications are not protected
Offsite backup strategy severely lacking : A quarter (24%) of financial organizations have no offsite backup and DR strategy leaving them wide open to risk in the event of natural disaster or theft. And 44% are still reliant on taking a disk or tape offsite at the end of
each day
« Les établissements financiers doivent respecter un grand nombre de normes et de réglementations en vigueur dans leur secteur. Ce n’est donc pas étonnant que ces entreprises soient quelque peu réfractaires à l’adoption de nouvelles technologies. Reste toutefois à espérer qu’elles aient mis en œuvre des stratégies élémentaires de sauvegarde et de reprise d’activité après sinistre », a déclaré Isabelle Delcuvellerie, Country Manager des régions France et Méditerranée au sein d’Acronis.
"Financial services have multiple industry standards and regulations which they must meet, for example [insert local FS data regulation]. It’s not surprising that companies in this industry are slightly conservative about the adoption of new technology, however you would hope that they would have the basic backup and DR strategies in place.” said Laurent Dedeins, President Sales & Marketing at Acronis.
“One finding that has been consistent throughout the indistries is that 76% of organisations world wide feel that the best way to improve their backup and recovery strategy would be a single solution for physical, virtual and cloud environments,” he continued. “If these organisations can look to one method and tool to manage their backups across the three environments, then the potential that virtualization and cloud has will propell it beyond other industries.”
The survey was conducted by the Ponemon Group across 13 countries in October 2010. Over 3,000 IT practitioners were surveyed in small- to mid-market organisations with no more than 1,000 seats across 13 countries. 425 work in financial services.
