Bangalore, March 30, 2012: A global survey of industry's awareness of, and preparedness for, disaster recovery, finds India to be a curious case, sending out a mixed message: fairly high levels of confidence and capability in DR are belied by the fact that almost half of Indian enterprises polled still back up just files and not entire data systems.
The survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute across 18 countries including (for the first time) India, on behalf of US-headquartered disaster recovery and data protection solutions leader Acronis, fuels the Acronis Global Disaster Recovery (DR) Index an annual barometer that provides a country-level ranking of backup and DR confidence levels and capabilities of businesses around the world. It’s the industry’s largest backup and disaster recovery benchmark.
India (47%) leads in its backup and DR confidence level and capabilities compared to other BRIC countries and ranks 2nd among the English speaking countries, explained Bill Taylor-Mountford, president for Asia Pacific, Acronis, during a media briefing in Bangalore on Thursday. 
When it comes to successfully recovering from a serious incident, the Indians were the most confident among the Asian businesses. 66% didn’t think their backup and DR operations would fail in the wake of a serious incident or event, compared to an Asian average of 50%. IT managers in India voiced a common grouse: that backup and DR did not get adequate priority within their organisations -- presumably because of lack of IT resources... yet Indian businesses are in fact spending a higher amount of IT budget on backup and DR (12%) than the Asian average (9%).

An overwhelming 80% of Indian businesses said the most beneficial thing that could improve their backup and DR strategy would be a single solution capable of delivering physical, virtual and cloud protection -- yet this awareness flies in the face of action on the ground - 48 percent don't take a full back up image of their resources, being satisfied with file only backup. Even here the frequency could be weekly or monthly, where enterprises in China do it on a daily basis.
Possibly as a result,  system downtime during the last 12 months in India, has, on average, lasted 1.7 days, shorter than the global average of 2.2 days ...but the cost was higher --.$392,082 compared to a global average of $366,363 per year.
Some 580 organisations participated in the survey from India, across a broad range of industries.
Entry level solutions from Acronis, like TrueImage Home, cost as little as $ 60 , says Taylor-Mountford -- a small price to pay to ensure that valuable data is never lost or if lost is swiftly recovered. http://acronisinfo.com/  
Supporting graphics: http://www.acronis.com.sg/promo/DRI-2012/