The adoption of Cloud computing by small to medium businesses (SMBs) in Australia has been slow and is not matching predictions, according to the second annual Acronis Global Disaster Recovery (DR) Index.
Acronis Pacific general manager, Karl Sive, said the growth predicted for Cloud adoption in 2011 was 30 per cent whereas in reality it grew only 19 per cent.
“Our synopsis seems to be Cloud is a discussion topic rather than reality and SMBs are still finding Cloud an emerging technology that is developing,” he said. “We think using online backup services can be a first step to putting their infrastructure into the Cloud.”
The global index had 311 respondents from Australia in the one to 500 seat market.
However, when it came up to backup and disaster recovery, more companies had adopted the technology in the wake of flooding in Australian states such as Queensland.
According to the index, 32 per cent reported that they had more DR resources and 39 per cent were confident they had the necessary technologies.
“One thing the findings don’t show is that almost a third of the organisations are still concerned that their backup and disaster recovery operations fail in the wake of a serious incident,” Sive said. “That’s very concerning because a similar number also wrote that they would suffer significant downtime as a result.”
Support from upper management for installing new DR offerings climbed by 22 per cent in Australia from the 2011 index. Last year, less than half (44 per cent) of the Australian businesses believed that they got enough support from executives. “It seems that business leaders and senior executives have been given a wakeup call in regards to backup and recovery following the events of the last 12 months,” Sive said.
However, the index noted that there were still gaps in support as some respondents indicated that IT still operates in a silo from other departments and board members did not want to hear about disaster recovery as it was bad news.
For the first time, the index predicted that virtualization would be adopted at a much faster rate amongst SMBs than enterprises. “A recent Gartner report found that virtualization adoption in the enterprise will increase by 14 per cent in 2012. However, SMB adoption will increase by 21 per cent this year due to efficiency improvements, flexibility and cost,” Sive said.
Sive added that SMBs were also experiencing unprecedented data growth due to a trend towards virtualization in the Cloud. “This means backup and disaster recovery is not only becoming more complex, but critical,” he said.
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