Data protection is a huge concern for any company. For SMBs, many challenges to protecting virtualized data may not be as pertinent in the enterprise, but they still create a seemingly insurmountable problem. According to the Veeam Annual Data Protection Report for 2013 (registration required for download), surveyed SMBs said the key points of contention within the realm of protecting their virtualized data are:
- Cost (85 percent)
- Capability (83 percent)
- Complexity (80 percent)
The report covered a wide array of business industries, including manufacturing (28 percent), business and professional service providers (23 percent), retail and distribution (20 percent), and financial service providers (16 percent). All others not in these categories made up 12 percent of the sample. IT executives, including CIOs, from 500 SMB organizations from the U.S., UK, France and Germany were questioned.
The SMBs that listed cost as a prohibitive issue when dealing with proper backup of virtualized servers identified three separate areas of expenses that contributed to their answer. First, at 51 percent, organizations felt that the high cost of ongoing management for virtualized servers was restrictive. Second, receiving 48 percent of the response, was the rising cost of licensing models. Lastly, 44 percent of SMBs surveyed identified issues with “backups either requiring or using too much storage” as another costly issue for the budget-strapped business.
Within the report, it was noted that the defined issues for SMBs were also more pronounced for the larger-sized business. For example, those with 751 to 1,000 employees ranked cost issues at 90 percent, while those with only 251 to 500 employees listed cost at only 78 percent. So even within the designated area of small to midsized businesses, a significant difference in opinions can be correlated to the size of the organization.
Any vendor hoping to gain business from SMBs should consider and address these concerns. Since many SMBs have limited IT staff and an even smaller IT budget, it would seem that SMB-specific virtualization products should cost less to manage, and have simple, affordable licensing models and fast, compact storage options that would benefit smaller organizations.