Research

'Backup? No problem!' say IT decision makers

New research finds that organisational confidence in backup capabilities has risen dramatically in the past 10 years

Interview

Cloud Wars

Ever wondered what the operational differences are between multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud and public cloud are? Speakers at The Cloud Migration Summit - Russell Warman, Head of Infrastructure and Operations at Auto Trader UK, and Andy Nelson, Associate Director of Informatics & Cloud Operations at Illumina, speak from experience about the benefits, challenges, considerations and strategy in choosing their specific cloud architecture

Feature

Good as gold

Scientists from Australia and China have drawn on the durable power of gold to demonstrate a new type of high-capacity optical disk that can hold data securely for more than 600 years, addressing the growing issue of 'Long data'

Comment

Welcome to the April edition of the Storage magazine eNewsletter, which includes a worrying news piece about UK businesses’ confidence in their DR planning. The new research suggests that while the majority (92%) had some sort of DR solution in place, less encouraging was how few knew how effective those systems are and whether they are robust enough – with less than two thirds carrying out regular tests.

As Mark Lomas of Probrand, the company who commissioned the research, commented: ‘‘You wouldn’t install a fire alarm and then never test it – why should DR be any different? If businesses aren’t carrying out regular tests every 2-3 months then they have no way of knowing if their system is up to scratch and whether it’s going to leave the business – and its customers – experiencing downtime for a day, a week or even longer.’’

Over 40% of UK businesses have either failed to test their DR systems in the last six months or don’t know when any sort of testing last took place - is your organisation among that disturbingly large number?

David Tyler, Editor david.tyler@btc.co.uk