SAN JOSE – IDC’s special report, “Data Protection in United States SMBs: Opportunity and Analysis,” has noted that Small to Medium-Sized businesses are increasingly adopting technologies like replication or disk-to-disk-to-tape backup that have only been previously seen in enterprise datacenters.

“Mid-sized businesses are increasingly facing some of the same challenges that larger firms face and therefore have similar requirements in terms of continuity of their business operations which replication can be used to address,” said Laura DuBois, program director, Storage Software at IDC.

Merle Sandler, research manager of SMBs and home offices with IDC, added that the move towards these enterprise-scale products is also due to the fact that SMBs are becoming more dependent on being online.

“The sheer amount of data has proliferated from what they did beforehand,” she said.

DuBois further explained that SMBs today also have heightened awareness of problems associated with data loss or systems being unavailable.

“They are more educated on the ramifications of that in terms of systems not being available to access to their data,” she observed. DuBois said these ramifications can include productivity or financial loss.

Of course SMBs are not ready to adopt enterprise-scale products that might be too complicated and expensive, and over-deliver. They look for solutions appropriate to their needs, which won’t require significant financial and human resources to acquire, deploy and manage.

DuBois advised SMBs to base their technology purchases on the priority for their applications as not all data is created equal. “You really want to prioritize or tier your applications based upon the importance of those applications to the business in terms of how quickly they need to be recovered and then deploy technology that allows you to meet those SLAs.”

Other key findings of IDC’s special report include SMBs are using diverse methods of data protection.

IDC noted that SMBs use three or more different data protection approaches such as backup-to-tape, backup-to-removable media or disk, replication and virtual tape libraries.

Another finding is that small businesses (SBs) and medium businesses (MBs) differ in their reasons for selecting data protection solutions. Sandler said that SBs focused on ease of use, whereas the MBs are looking at how to integrate these data protection solutions into their existing environment and how functional is the product.

In addition, SBs and MBs differ regarding their future data protection methods. SBs are most interested in online backup and MBs are most interested in remote replication and virtual tape libraries.

“Vendors looking to capitalize on the SMB interest in various data protection technologies need to develop product capabilities and position their offerings with messages important to SMB customers,” said DuBois.

DuBois and Sandler said that SMBs using enterprise-class storage technology creates some vendor opportunities in terms of providing them with partnerships for online services for backup and disaster recovery.

“The idea of online backup is certainly gaining traction amongst smaller firms,” said Sandler. DuBois added that suppliers have been focusing on this opportunity as seen by the availability of solutions targeted for the SMB as it relates to data protection and recovery.

Natalya Yezhkova, research manager for Storage Systems at IDC added that at the same time, education of end users and channel partners about return on investment and potential cost savings will be critical for breaking through the ‘pricing is too high’ concern. The IDC report noted that data protection is a big part of storage budgets among SMBs.

“This is especially true when price savings are less obvious, as with online services. Vendors need to teach end users to look at the whole picture that involves all the different types of expenses associated with different approaches to data protection, including intangible benefits like the ability to restore data quickly in a case of failure,” she said.

This column was written by Vanessa Ho of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany

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