The physical loss of tapes can often be blamed on the fact that the physical transportation of tapes involves many "hands" moving them from their silo slots to bins to transport trucks to a physical archive location, to their storage slots and back again, Gartner said in its report. Eliminating all touch points also eliminates the possibility of human error or theft, Couture said.

In light of that, 35 percent of survey respondents said they plan to switch to network-based backups, while another 20 percent cited plans to move to disk-to-disk-based storage.