Backup data dogging businesses.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: UP FRONT: News, Trends & Analysis - Survey - Brief article

According to BridgeHead Software's Annual Information Lifecycle Management Audit, backup data in organizations is so voluminous that it is disrupting business by tying up systems, storage, and network capacity and consuming valuable IT resources.

As part of the survey of 472 IT executives in the United Kingdom and North America, 59 percent said the volume of data they have to backup is disrupting business operations or will do so eventually. Ninety-three percent said their routine backup volumes are increasing. This leads to more work for IT departments; 37 percent of respondents spend more than 9 hours on daily backups of primary data.

More than two-thirds (84 percent) of respondents said they would benefit from reducing the volume of data they routinely back up. By doing so, they said IT departments could:

* Devote less time to backup and other business-continuity processes (69 percent)

* Reduce the impact of backup and...