More businesses moving to the cloud for data backup.

• Position: BUSINESS CONTINUITY

An increasing number of organizations are looking to the cloud to back up their company data, according to Kroll Ontrack research.

Kroll studied the data backup practices of more than 500 companies in North America, Asia, and Europe that have suffered data losses. According to the survey, among companies with no data backup plans, 51% are still considering hard drives for primary data backup, while 23% are considering moving their backup data to the cloud.

When compared to the results of the same survey conducted in 2015, Kroll found that businesses are slowly moving away from external hard drives (down 17% from the previous year) and toward cloud consideration, which has increased by 5%.

Most organizations have procedures in place to back up their data, but challenges remain.

"Maintaining a traditional backup solution takes time and due diligence. For instance, think about the exponential growth in data volumes that IT teams are handling and backing up. That growing volume translates into time--significant time," said Todd Johnson, vice president of data and storage technologies at Kroll Ontrack. "And it's not a 'set it and forget it' process. Backup health...