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As more businesses look to cloud storage to meet their business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) needs, a new study revealed that 80 percent of cloud storage users can recover their data in less than 24 hours.

In comparison, nearly one in six respondents who do not use cloud storage estimated that it would take more than a week to recovery their data in the event of a disaster, according to TwinStrata’s (News - Alert) 2012 Cloud Storage Adoption Survey.

The survey’s findings demonstrate a critical mass that’s forming around cloud storage, according to Lorita Ba, director of marketing at TwinStrata.

“Although other cloud computing technologies like software as a service has experienced greater adoption to date, more and more organizations have recognized that cloud storage delivers a simple, practical and cost-effective solution to problems such as exponentially increasing data growth, disaster recovery and out-of-control costs,” Ba wrote in a recent blog post.

Further evidence of this trend can be found in this figure: according to the survey, 70 percent of cloud storage users intend to expand their use of cloud storage.

While both Software- as -a -Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) and Infrastructure- as -a -Service (IaaS) have greater degrees of current implementations, cloud storage represents the greatest number of planned implementations. Nearly 90 percent of respondents either currently use or plan to use cloud storage.

In addition, salability and the need to manage growing storage needs was highlighted as the top value cloud storage could provide, with nearly two-thirds of respondents indicating its value. Meanwhile, 68 percent of current cloud storage users cited offsite data protection for disaster recovery as a key benefit, but only 26 percent of users with no cloud storage plans said the same.

“Organizations require immediate solutions to problems such as rapidly escalating data growth and disaster recovery requirements,” the report said. “The ability to implement cloud storage incrementally at first and to grow it over time, provides a unique opportunity for organizations to solve their immediate problems while testing the viability a long-term storage strategy.”

More than two-thirds of respondents with plans to implement cloud storage either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “It seems like we are always running out of storage.” By contrast, current cloud storage users scored a full 20 points lower on the same question.

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