Cloud storage and virtualisation adoption surges: Kroll Ontrack

The adoption of Cloud storage and virtualisation is increasing, in accordance with data recovery vendor, Kroll Ontrack.

A recent Cloud survey conducted at VMware Forums globally with 367 enterprise and services providers showed 62 per cent of respondents are leveraging the Cloud and/or virtualisation.

However, it projected that only 33 per cent of those organisations test data recovery plans regularly to make certain proper protocols are in place to offer protection to this information.

Kroll Ontrack data recovery product manager, Abhik Mitra, said it’s clear that the Cloud is instantly gaining ground among organisations seeking to streamline their technology infrastructure and cut IT costs.

“However, data loss can occur in any environment, whatever the specific technology. The major to minimising a knowledge loss risk and successfully recovering from a loss is looking the appropriate questions earlier than adopting a brand new storage medium and amending your policies and procedures accordingly,” he said. When asked about their Cloud provider’s ability to correctly handle data loss incidents, 29 per cent revealed a scarcity of confidence, when compared with 55 per cent of respondents in 2011.

However, just 17 per cent of them said they test their data recovery plan regularly to validate technical and personnel readiness against Cloud or virtual data loss technical recovery capabilities and 13 per cent responded not having an information recovery plan.

Other findings from the study include:

• 26 per cent reported data loss from a virtual environment, three per cent reported a loss from the Cloud and 16 per cent experienced data loss from both a virtual environment in addition to the Cloud.
• 26 per cent of them leverage infrastructure as a service (IaaS), 16 per cent leverage Software as a Service (SaaS) and 13 per cent utilise both IaaS and SaaS.
• 49 per cent of organisations reported experiencing some kind of data loss within the last year, but not necessarily from the Cloud and 55 per cent denoted data was lost from a normal storage device.

“Virtualisation is the engine of Cloud technology. If virtualisation fails, the cloud fails. It’s critical to have a knowledge recovery provider that may be experienced in complex storage platforms similar to virtual environments denoted on your data recovery plan,” Mitra said.

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