VMware Research Report Sample

SMBs’ prioritization of disaster recovery, backup and high availability for 2008 shows that businesses understand the risks to their business and the value of protection. However, many organizations still errantly think that backup is a sufficient disaster recovery plan. But, mid-sized enterprises are at the most risk to disaster and are more likely to rely strictly on backup as a disaster recovery plan.

The needs and resources of mid-market firms are unique. Midsized companies must work with limited finances infrastructure and human resources. Robust disaster recovery used to be affordable and manageable only by large enterprises. Mid-sized enterprises relied more on backup than on a formal disaster recovery plan. As businesses’ reliance on IT has grown, backup has increasingly shown its weaknesses. However, the introduction and maturation of several key technologies, such as virtualization, have brought affordable and easily implementable DR to small and mid-sized companies. But as Exhibit 1 shows, SMBs don’t always equate virtualization with DR because awareness of the many virtualization applications is just starting to grow. For this Report, Yankee Group collected data specifically for companies with 100 to 1,100 employees and interviewed six companies from different industries in this range.