A new study by a leading international virtualisation firm has found that data protection is the one of the most significant benefits afforded to small and medium sized businesses by virtualisation.
Over the last two years a third of all small businesses have suffered data loss as a result of data centre failures and as such, over half of all the respondents said that the protection and restoration of their data would be significant considerations throughout 2010.
The most worrying statistic brought to light by the survey is the news that a fifth of small businesses had been unable to recover any data after the failure of their backup systems, with a resultant loss of business occurring in most cases.
Only 47 per cent of respondents said that their business had renewed its disaster recovery program since 2007, whilst the remaining 53 per cent indicated that they did not have any firm policy governing data backup and protection.
A spokesperson for the author of the survey said that the desire of most small businesses to retain their current customer base was at odds with the lack of proper data backup and recovery plans in most, as the failure of a data centre and the loss of data could severely impact on their ability to retain existing customers.
The survey suggests that many businesses could benefit from virtualisation and backup using cloud computing. Business continuity is incredibly important for the relatively fragile SMB sector and of course the lower costs that cloud computing offers can instantly benefit small businesses.
Those businesses that were currently using virtualisation reported significant benefits via the survey. 73 per cent said that they had been able to cut down on the amount of time spent performing basic IT admin tasks, whilst 68 per cent said that they were now better able to deal with and adapt to changes in the market.
Those who had managed to improve their business continuity and data security were also more likely to have experienced growth and increased profitability as a result of virtualisation and cloud computing technologies.
