Backup data dogging businesses.

According to BridgeHead Software's Annual Information Lifecycle Management Audit, backup data in organizations is so voluminous that it is disrupting business by tying up systems, storage, and network capacity and consuming valuable IT resources.

As part of the survey of 472 IT executives in the United Kingdom and North America, 59 percent said the volume of data they have to backup is disrupting business operations or will do so eventually. Ninety-three percent said their routine backup volumes are increasing. This leads to more work for IT departments; 37 percent of respondents spend more than 9 hours on daily backups of primary data.

More than two-thirds (84 percent) of respondents said they would benefit from reducing the volume of data they routinely back up. By doing so, they said IT departments could:

* Devote less time to backup and other business-continuity processes (69 percent)

* Reduce the impact of backup and replication on network use and capacity (60 percent)

* Reduce disk resources devoted to data snapshotting, replication, and mirroring (58 percent)

One of the most effective ways of reducing the pressure on backups is to take static or rarely accessed information and archive it off primary storage systems, according to BridgeHead Software CEO Tony Cotterill.

"Sixty-one percent of organizations in our survey admit that between 30 to 50 percent of data on their primary disk is unlikely to be accessed ever again, yet they are squandering time and resources on backing up and replicating this big chunk of static data," Cotterill told Techworld.