IT directors struggling to get board support for disaster recovery plans

Businesses in the UK are making too many mistakes in planning their strategies for backup and disaster recovery, according to new research launched today.

The Global Disaster Recovery Index revealed that UK businesses were on average 17 per cent more confident about their disaster recovery capabilities than they were in last year's Index, but that the added confidence did not coincide with improvements in strategy making.

The Index pointed to failure to get executive buy-in, with 40 per cent of IT managers from the UK businesses who responded feeling that their company is not supportive of their backup and disaster recovery operations.

The report is based on a survey carried out by research company Ponemon Institute and published by backup vendor Acronis.

The survey measured IT managers' confidence in their recovery solutions and was taken across a number of businesses around the world in areas including the US, Japan and Australia.

The Index showed that 64 per cent of the UK IT managers surveyed agreed that the biggest challenge in a hybrid environment is moving data between physical, virtual and cloud environments.

However, almost half of the UK businesses (46 per cent) used three or more different solutions to protect their data as opposed to consolidating their backup and disaster recovery.

Many businesses are not backing up their data because they think it is unnecessary to back up data that is held on a virtual environment, according to the findings.

"Many businesses don't back up their virtual environments. This is because the decision makers and the staff can lack the technical knowledge about disaster recovery," said David Blackman, European general manager at Acronis.

Blackman suggested that confidence levels in disaster recovery are linked to the levels of investment.

"The confidence in disaster recovery has risen since last year in the UK because of perceived improvements, such as having the right resources, technologies and procedures in place," he said.

"IT leaders will focus on disaster recovery when a disaster occurs and they should shift their focus to prevention as opposed to a cure," he added.