Report: UK pubic sector IT lacks disaster recovery

The public sector is the UK industry with the least infrastructure for backup and disaster recovery (DR), according to a survey published this week. The UK findings of the global survey showed that nearly 61 per cent of respondents in the public sector say their DR is not well managed, and a similar proportion – 59 per cent – say business executives are not supportive of backup and DR operations. Not surprisingly, respondents blamed lack of budget and resources.

The UK wasn't the only country in which the public sector has poor DR. The Global Disaster Recovery Index 2012, commissioned by DR specialist Acronis and carried out across 18 countries by independent research firm the Ponemon Institute, polled almost 6,000 companies with up to 1,000 seats.

On a global basis, a third of public sector organisations do not spend any budget at all on backup and DR, and 41 per cent say they lack skilled IT personnel to manage all of their systems.

"Public sector budget cuts globally are hitting every department hard, but... by embracing new technologies, such as virtualisation and cloud, and by consolidating the number of backup product they have, many public sector organisations could improve their disaster recovery processes and save money," said David Blackman, EMEA general manager for Acronis.

The survey showed that the public sector has been slow to adopt virtualisation so far. A third of all UK public sector organisations have not adopted virtualisation at all. Similarly, the public sector is the least likely to protect its virtual servers, with 71 per cent claiming they either do not back up or do not know if they back up their virtual servers as often as their physical ones.

But there is some hope in cloud computing: 86 per cent of UK public sector organisations predict they will be using cloud in the next 12 months and 56 per cent agree that cloud lowers operational costs. However, 36 per cent have no off-site backup strategy at all, so they would not recover in the case of an on-site disaster.

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