Twin Surveys Highlights Disparity Between Archiving and Backup Practices

October 9th, 2006: A pair of identical US and UK surveys have discovered that American businesses are better at archiving data, but still not completely up to speed on the difference between backing up and archiving.

Conducted by BridgeHead Software, the survey shows that despite, or perhaps because of the hype surrounding US complaints regulations, American companies also suffer less under the weight of compliance regulations than their British counterparts.

When it comes to the difference between backup and archiving, however, the surveys found that both countries demonstrated high levels of confusion around the different roles each process plays.

“The differences between US and UK companies with respect to archiving practices may well reflect the dilemma confronting US IT organisations: that of having to select and manage separate archive tools for databases, email, content management systems, and unsorted user files,” says Jon William Toigo, CEO of data management consulting and research firm Toigo Partners International. “Thus far, the US vendor community has shown little interest in cooperating in any sort of overarching scheme of archive management, which in turn imposes a huge burden on IT administrators.”

The surveys key findings include:

• In the UK, 28 per cent of companies do not archive data. In the USA, the figure is 23 per cent – a small improvement but still a significant minority.
• In the UK, 25 per cent of those that do archive use some kind of automated tool. In the USA, this figure rises to 32 per cent.
• Respondents have different levels of faith in their archive procedures. In the UK, 15 per cent of respondents didn’t know how long it would take them to retrieve a vital file lost three months ago, but in the USA this rises to 20 per cent. In the UK, two per cent of respondents admitted that they wouldn’t be able to find the file, but this rose to six per cent among USA companies.
• Twenty two per cent of UK respondents cited compliance/corporate governance as a driver for archiving, but this figure fell to just 15 per cent among US respondents.
• However, asked if regulatory compliance was a factor at all in their business, 48 per cent of UK respondents said no, compared to 42 per cent in the USA.
• Forty eight per cent of UK respondents say that business continuity and disaster recovery is a driver for archiving. In the USA the figure is 40 per cent, but - despite making backups/restores faster and simpler by reducing the size of primary data stores is not the answer to data protection according to the survey.
• The average size of primary data stores among the UK respondents was 4.37TB, while among USA respondents the average size was lower at 3.5TB. This may be explained by figures showing that only 33 per cent of UK respondents have an archive of greater than 1TB, while the corresponding figure for the USA is a much higher 48 per cent, suggesting greater success at identifying data that can be removed from expensive primary storage.

“Generally, the respective figures in each survey are within shouting distance of each other, lending validity to the survey,” says Tony Cotterill, CEO of BridgeHead Software. “But while there are interesting differences between the two markets, there are also worrying similarities – notably the confusion over the different functions, execution and purposes of backup and archiving.

“Too many respondents in both countries are using backup software to create archives, which just isn’t appropriate. An archive involves indexing content so it can be retrieved later using a keyword search, anything else is just backup. The fact that business continuity and disaster recovery heads the list of drivers for archiving in both countries reinforces the conclusion that many people are confused,” he added.

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