Oslo: More than one in three Norwegian companies would spend a lot of time getting up and running again if important IT systems were to fail.
This is one of the findings of the Storage Barometer, an annual IT survey carried out by market analysis company YouGov on behalf of Proact. 174 Norwegian IT managers from major corporations in the public and private sector took part in this survey, and of them more than half admitted that their organisations are vulnerable to loss of information.
“They all agree that backups are a necessary, very elementary part of their operations, but even so this is one of the biggest sins of omission at many Norwegian companies and organisations,” says Eirik Pedersen, Managing Director of Proact IT Norge. He points out that even though most organisations have backup solutions in one form or another, there is not much emphasis on restoring data; that is, on looking at how quickly data lost can be reconstructed.
Several weeks of downtime
Only just over one in four companies has technology and procedures in place which would require half a day or less to get back up and running if they were to lose a business-critical system. The survey shows that for 31% of companies, an IT failure would result in several days of downtime, and 5% of companies would actually need several weeks to get back to normal.
“I doubt whether most companies could withstand several weeks of downtime. This could mean millions of kroner in lost revenues, as well as losing the trust of clients and partners. This kind of problem can linger for a number of years,” warns Pedersen.
According to analysis company Gartner, the total amount of information held by the average company increases by a factor of 30% each year. Pedersen is of the view that most companies could halve the amount of disk space they use. “Data which is more than six months old is rarely used and should be moved from the primary storage to an archive. A lot of space can also be saved by deleting duplicate data,” he says.
20 copies per file
Duplicates and copies are precisely what make putting reliable, functional backup solutions in place so demanding and costly an exercise. One image file sent by e-mail to ten colleagues becomes a dozen identical image files. Over time, this leads to an explosion in the number of files stored, and so more and more major corporations have started using deduplication technology where copies of files are deleted and replaced with pointers.
“At an ordinary company, there are on average 20 copies of every single file stored. According to Gartner, deduplication technology will be available in more or less all new IT products coming onto the market by 2014, and deduplication will be used in connection with 75% of all backups. But there is no reason to wait so long. The technology is already available, and there is much to gain for anyone starting to use it early on,” says Pedersen.
(Pressenytt)
Contact person
* Proact IT Norge AS, Managing Director Eirik Pedersen, tel. +47 22 89 23 89, mobile +47 930 34134
About Proact
Proact is a specialist in storage, archiving and securing large volumes of mission-critical information. As an independent integrator, Proact provides systems, support and consulting services within its focus area of data storage and archiving.
The Proact Group has more than 420 employees and conducts business in Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden.
Proact was founded in 1994 and its parent company, Proact IT Group AB (publ) has been listed on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm since 1999 under the symbol PACT.
Additional information about Proact is available at www.proact.eu.
