Lauren Whitehouse — an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group – has a great article about using virtualization for desktop backup in this month’s Storage (free subscription required to view article). She also included some startling statistics about the number of PCs that are not backed up.

According to recent ESG research, only 26% of nearly 500 midmarket and enterprise IT respondents said that all of their desktop PCs are backed up, and only 18% of organizations back up all of their laptops. Furthermore, 24% of respondents said they have no data protection process at all for their desktops, and 29% don’t back up their laptops.

The problem is that a lot of your company’s data is stored on those laptops that you aren’t backing up. Of course, the easy solution is backup and disaster recovery software, like ShadowProtect, that will back up all that data without requiring intervention from your users.  ShadowProtect is compatible with all kinds of virtualized systems, too.

I can tell you from firsthand experience that backups of your desktops and laptops will save you hours and hours of lost productivity. Consider the cost of the software versus the likelihood that you will have a PC crash. ESG puts the average hard drive failure rate at 2-4%. When you add on the other crises that can hit you (stolen laptops, weather disasters,viruses and malware, user mishandling) and the need for a reliable backup on each end user system can skyrocket.  Why play the numbers game? You should be protecting all of the systems and data in your enterprise because the alternative could be frightening.