"Verification of backups is critical for companies," echoed Riddell. "We've had calls from clients where they are doing everything they're supposed to. They go to restore a backup and what they're not doing is verifying their backups to ensure that what they're actually trying to backup is there and ready to restore should they need it."
But making successful backups is meaningless unless enterprises can prove they can get the data back -- and get it back in a timely fashion, Sloan pointed out. "Just saying, 'We can get it back,' often isn't enough," he said. "It has to be back in a certain time frame or you're going to start losing money."
Focusing exclusively on the backup is a mistake, warned Sloan. "When you focus on the backup you say, 'We have to back up X number of terabytes once a week' and your measure of success is whether the backup ran. The real issue is, 'If we need to get that back, how long will it take and how likely is it that it's going to be there?'" he said.
Backup data from desktops AND servers
"The vast majority of organizations are backing up, but they are primarily backing up on servers," noted James Quin, senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. "They are not doing a tremendous amount of backup on desktops."
This is a problem because while corporations may believe there is nothing really important on the desktop, studies have shown that a lot of data isn't in structured format, said Quin.
Roughly 50 per cent of corporate data in North America is structured and 50 per cent is unstructured -- and these are conservative metrics, Quin pointed out. Of the 50 per cent that's unstructured, half is in e-mail and the other half is on things like workstations and files shares, he said.
"Some organizations do take backups of their desktops, but it's a very small percentage," said Quin. "This is probably around 20 to 25 per cent."
Consider restore speed and reliability when purchasing new backup media
A lot of enterprises looking at more efficient ways of performing backups, such as disk-to-disk solutions and virtual tape libraries, are doing so because they find their media isn't as reliable as they hoped or it's taking too long to perform backups to tape, according to Sloan.
Enterprises determine how much data they want to back up every night and find they aren't able to backup everything in the amount of time they are given, Sloan explained. "Taking too long to do backup to tape ... might be a trigger for looking at those technologies, but the value of those technologies is in the restore side," he said.