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Traditional backup solutions remain popular among businesses worldwide, but cloud is slowly and surely taking over. A new report from disaster recovery firm Databarracks claims more than half (51 percent) of businesses are now using online or cloud backups.

Based on a poll of 400 IT decision-makers in the UK, the report says the use of cloud for backup has risen from 23 percent in 2008 to 51 percent today.

At the same time, 15 percent of firms still use a combination of disk and tape for backups (down from a peak of 29 percent, back in 2012), while four percent use only tape.

According to Peter Groucutt, Managing Director of Databarracks, reports of tapes death are greatly exaggerated.

Storage prices have reduced to make cloud backup viable for the majority of the market, but the lowest-cost method of storage is still tape, he says. For organizations with vast data volumes in industries such as life sciences or broadcast media it meets that need.

Besides its cost efficiency, tape also remains popular due to the need for companies to keep old records for compliance reasons.

This puts some companies off moving due to the cost and manpower required to manage two backup methods while older retentions expire, he added.

Regardless of these considerations, businesses should still opt for a cloud-based backup solution, Groucutt reiterates, as the new tech offers major benefits.

Backup is one of the repetitive jobs that can really take time away from the IT team. Improving the speed of backups is not one of the most exciting IT projects, but it has a huge impact on the efficiency of IT operations. The lockdowns over the last 18 months have also driven more interest in completely automated backup solutions that dont require manual interaction like with tape libraries.

Read more:
More than half of businesses have turned to the cloud for backup needs - ITProPortal