Survey finds replication at top of business continuity wish lists

Published 19 October 2006

A $2 billion industry looks to the future as demand grows for real-time data imaging; BakBone leads the way with a replication service that works across platforms and operating systems to achieve large-scale security at a low-scale cost

When it comes to business continuity, the learning curve can appear quite steep. Every week, it seems, we report on a survey of executives as to their thoughts on the matter, and inevitably the result is a much larger number of those who think it is important than those who actually follow through. These studies are important because they demonstrate that continuity service providers are not doing enough to make it easy for companies to implement an already acknowledged need, and yet these same studies often lack information of what it is exactly companies want. A new survey of channel partners by BakBone Software, a provider of heterogeneous integrated data protection solutions, provides an answer: of the more than 75 percent of respondents who reported customers with an allocated budget for disaster recovery technology, 40 percent said replication — the real time back-up of business information — will be deployed more than any other IT continuity service.

BakBone, of course, is in the replication business, and no doubt the company was pleased by the results of its own survey. Yet it is nevertheless correct that replication is an expanding market, with total revenue increasing 18 percent between 2004 and 2005 to a whopping $2 billion. Much of this, we believe, is due to heightened awareness of the importance of continuity planning for business’s sake, and also by government initiatives such as Sarbanes Oxley, which demands that financial companies safely store business data. Replication is one of the better and more efficient ways to go, especially if, like BakBones’s NetVault, the system used can work across various programming environments. According to the survey, “eighty-two percent of the respondents resoundingly indicated their customers would be interested in simplifying and centralizing the management of different data protection solutions — backup and recovery, replication, vaulting and snapshot — to ensure they work together seamlessly and across different computing platforms, including Windows, Linux, and UNIX.”

-read more in this news release