Virtual Data Vulnerable Due To Poor Backup

Many businesses are enjoying the benefits of virtualisation and storage arrays, but it seems that an astonishing number of businesses are not properly protecting these virtual machines.

Data storage and protection provider Symantec revealed 22 November in its annual disaster recovery survey that only about 20 percent of IT managers are using replication and failover technologies to protect mission-critical data in virtual environments.

“A lot of companies look at backup as their fallback archive, and it’s not the same at all [as replication and failover],” Symantec Senior Product Marketing Manager Peter Elliman, who supervised the Symantec 2010 Disaster Recovery Study, told eWEEK.

Chronic Lack Of Backups

“It was surprising to us that what often is the most important business data wasn’t being protected completely in virtualised environments.”

The survey also indicated that 56 percent of data on virtual systems is not even regularly backed up at least once per month.

“Part of that is because some of that data is test dev data, so people feel there’s no need to back that up. But in other instances, it’s a selective decision about what they [storage and IT managers] want to do,” Elliman said.

The study also found that nearly 60 percent of respondents use  multiple tools to manage and protect applications and data in virtual environments, which can cause security problems for data centre managers.

Symantec asked Applied Research West to survey more than 1,700 IT managers in large organisations [5,000 employees or more] in 18 countries and across a span of industries to understand issues associated with business IT disaster recovery.

Security Worries

Two-thirds of respondents – as is about standard in all surveys of this type – reported that security concerns are still the main roadblock to deploying enterprise applications in a cloud service rather than on site. Control of failovers and making resources highly available were key issues for 55 percent of respondents.

“There’s no question that virtualisation and cloud, while they provide lots of benefits to different parts of the data centre organisation, they do introduce complexity into the DR process, because companies are basically bridging physical and virtual systems, handling data at rest in one location and mixing in cloud stuff,” Elliman said.

“The question is: How can they manage all that while feeling confident that you  have the right levels of protection in these niche-type, if you will, virtual or cloud environments?”