According to a recent survey conducted by disaster recovery and data protection solutions provider Acronis, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) around the world are planning to adopt server virtualization in 2012 at a faster pace than large enterprises. However, the survey also identified widespread backup and disaster recovery shortcomings for virtual servers amongst SMBs. Meanwhile, previous enthusiasm for cloud infrastructure has, at least so far, failed to turn into reality.
IT managers at 6,000 SMBs in 18 countries were surveyed for the Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index 2012. They predict that 29 percent of their servers will be virtualized by the end of the year, a growth rate of 21 percent. This is 50 percent higher than the pace identified in a recent Gartner report that predicted virtualization adoption by enterprises is to increase by 14 percent over the same period. According to the Acronis survey, SMBs cited increased efficiency, flexibility and speed of deployment as the main drivers for server virtualization.
Survey respondents claim that the monetary value of data hosted on virtual servers is almost identical to that hosted on physical servers. Commenting on the findings Bill Taylor-Mountford, President-Asia Pacific at Acronis said, "Virtualization has become more affordable and relatively easy for SMBs to implement the high growth rate of virtualization adoption should not be a surprise".
The survey also found that like-for-like global confidence regarding the right resources (tools and environment) and the right technologies for the job to cope with a disaster has risen 14 percent over the past 12 months. India is the only BRIC member that is actually above average in confidence levels with a Confidence Index of 1.21 on a scale of -5 to 5 placing it 9th.