New research from analyst IDC suggests that small and medium sized businesses (SMBs)  everywhere need to use the cloud for data management but the complexity is making it painfully expensive. This suggests there is massive demand for managed services and hosting among SMBs.

A cross industry survey of businesses with less than 1,000 employees found that the SMBs in France, Germany, Russia, the UK, Japan, Korea, Singapore and the US are compelled to use off-site back up and disaster recovery, but lack the skills and experience to manage the process cost effectively.

According to IDC, SMBs recognize that off site data management, back up and disaster recovery are an imperative. The average cost of downtime, according to nearly 80% of companies, would be at least $20,000 per hour or more. A significant minority (20%) put the cost per hour of data loss at $100,000 or more.

While the use of data centers among SMBs is increasing, there is a widespread recognition that a service provider could run the operations more efficiently the survey said.

The global average for using backup to the cloud among SMBs is 65%. The US leads the way with 93% of SMBs trusting some portion of their back up to the cloud. Both Western Europe (with 63% using cloud storage) and Asia Pacific (57%) have more potential for growth.

It is the complexity of heterogeneous environments that worried SMBs, according to Eric Burgener, IDC’s storage research director.

Almost 37% of SMBs have to come to terms with virtual, physical and cloud-based servers, and of that sample group, 54% have to manage two or more hypervisors.

“It’s a different world for IT managers today and data backup for a small or medium-sized business is more complex than ever,” said Burgener. As data sizes and types increase, and servers and operating systems change, SMBs are finding their management costs getting out of hand, he said.