Don't just sit on your backup data, use it!

New research from Computing reveals that much can be done with backup data, and that only a fifth of organisations are so far making effective use of it

Backup data can be put to work in a variety of ways, but only one in five UK-based organisations are currently making efficient use of it, according to new research from Computing.

Backup information can be used in place of live data for testing new applications and software patches, for Quality Assurance, analysed for insight, deployed for disaster recovery testing, integrated with production systems, used for reporting, mitigating risk from new systems and more.

When asked, a third of medium to large UK-based organisations said that they recognised the various applications for backup data, but only a fifth said they were actually using it.

When asked what business benefits might result from finding new uses for backup data, 44 per cent said: 'More resilient backup procedures'; 36 per cent said: ' A useful resource of developers / testers / DevOps'; 33 per cent said: 'Business insight from analytics and 28 per cent said: 'Increased business agility'.

Computing also asked about which storage technologies are used for backups. Hard disks and arrays came top, followed by network attached storage. Perhaps surprisingly tape is still there after all these years. At the bottom came Flash and non-flash solid state storage, which presumably most feel is too expensive for backups and optical storage such as DVDs, which are perhaps too slow to write to be useful.

Turning to the barriers preventing firms from using backup data for other purposes; more than half of the respondents remained to be convinced that there was any need to use backups for other purposes, while for 31 per cent it was not a pressing priority. For the remainder, though, a variety of hurdles stood in their way, primarily regulations, complexity, a lack of infrastructure to make it happen and costs of software licensing.

This research will be presented in full, and your questions answered during a live webinar broadcast on Thursday 20th July at 3pm. Register now to confirm your place.