Enterprises and SMBs Interested in Data Backup as a Service

About 60 percent of 1250 information technology managers surveyed by Forrester Research (News - Alert) are "interested,” deploying, plan to deploy or already have deployed some form of online data backup "as a service," Forrester Research reported. Also, both small and mid-sized businesses as well as enterprises seem more interested in online backup of PCs than moving their data centers to some cloud-based alternative. 

About six percent of small and medium-sized businesses, and seven percent of enterprises, already have adopted backup as a service, the study found.

Some three percent of SMBs and seven percent of enterprises report they are upgrading or expanding their backup "as a service" programs. 

About 11 percent of SMBs and 11 percent of enterprises have plans to implement, with four percent of both enterprises and SMBs saying they plan to do so within the next 12 months. 

Some 40 percent of SMBs and 36 percent of enterprise respondents said they were interested in such services, but have not current plans to adopt. 

Although SMBs were the early customers of online backup, in recent years it has been the enterprise that leads in adoption, said Forrester Research Analyst, Rachel A. Dines, in a statement.

Large enterprises are mainly interested in online backup not to replace core data center backups of mission-critical and business-critical servers but to back up corporate PCs as well as PCs and small servers at remote and branch offices where there may be limited IT staff.

But some enterprises with smaller data capacities might also use an online backup service for both PCs and critical servers, said Dines. If they do, they will probably take advantage of an online backup service that supports a hybrid approach in which backups are first conducted locally to a disk appliance and a second copy of the data is later vaulted to the vendor’s data center.

In terms of market segmentation, online PC backup and online server backup are most appropriate for businesses with less than a thousand employees. Businesses or organizations with 1,000 to 4,999 employees will add online server backup with a hybrid approach, backing up locally to disk and then a second copy to a vault.  

Enterprises with 5,000 employees or more will add online server backup and backups for remote office application and database servers. 

The findings are noteworthy for larger telcos and other large providers of cloud-based applications, not so much because IT managers see the logic of online backups of PCs and servers, but because doing so requires faith that the provider has geographic scale, financial longevity, references and expertise. Telcos have all those attributes. But firms such as Google, IBM, Amazon, Dell (News - Alert) or Symantec, for example, arguably offer the same set of values. 

That suggests online backup services could be an early beneficiary of demand for cloud-based software and managed services offered by large telcos and application providers, beyond the initial "computing as a service" or "storage as a service" offerings.