It’s a nice pastime: thinking about what you would do if you won the jackpot in the lottery. Well, here’s something else to think about: what could organizations do if they were better protected against data loss and downtime? According to a new survey, data loss and downtime costs enterprises 1.360 billion euros a year. This new Global Data Protection Index* brings some interesting paradoxes to light.
That number – 1.360 billion euros a year – is simply staggering. To put this into perspective: that’s about 50 per cent of the German Gross Domestic Product, so half of German industry. Imagine what better use companies could put that money to. The survey also revealed that we are not really getting better at protecting the valuable asset that data constitute.
But let’s get through the hard facts first:
– Data loss is up 400 per cent since 2012;
– The number of incidents is decreasing overall, but the volume of data lost during an incident is growing exponentially;
– 64 per cent of enterprises polled in the Vanson Bourne survey have experienced more than three working days of unexpected downtime in the last 12 months;
– 71% of IT professionals are not fully confident in their ability to recover information following an incident;
– 51% of organizations have no disaster recovery plans for new technologies like big data, hybrid cloud and mobile.
Personally, I was particularly alarmed by this last fact, and by the statement that 62 per cent of respondents say they find big data, mobile and hybrid cloud ‘difficult to protect’. This is particularly worrying, as nowadays, 30 per cent of all primary data is located in some form of cloud storage. How come we are so badly guarding the data we are putting to work in new technologies? I think an explanation for this comes from the fact that we are still focused on protecting structured data that we are storing on site. This is not the case, of course, with what we call emerging workloads. With hybrid cloud data, you have information in multiple locations and you may not be able to install the same data protection solutions in all of these. For mobile data, the devices it’s stored on may not regularly see a network. And, for big data, the amount of information can put pressure on backup windows.
Another worrying finding from the Global Data Protection Index is the paradox that the more vendors you engage with to help you protect your assets, the more trouble you may find yourself in. Businesses using three or more vendors to supply data protection solutions lost three times as much data as those which unified their data protection strategy around a single vendor. These enterprises with three vendors were also likely to spend an average of 2.4 million euros more on their data protection infrastructure compared to those with just one. Using multiple vendors may give you a false feeling of being protected, so it seems. Apparently, using multiple solutions is making management of these point solutions more difficult, and it also becomes difficult to fully understand where each solutions starts and ends.
So what shall we do with these findings? The answer is certainly not to bury your head in the sand. As we are amassing more data each year, the impact of data loss is growing exponentially. Businesses need to protect these crucial assets from malicious attacks, natural disasters and system failures. We advise businesses to take a holistic approach to data protection, choosing advanced solutions that can work together with your existing data protection architecture. Only when you do this, will the protection you pay for so dearly, really prove invaluable.
*The Global Data Protection Index was conducted by Vanson Bourne and surveyed 3,300 IT decision-makers from mid-size to enterprise-class businesses across 24 countries. Read the full report here.
Arnaud Bacros is Country Manager of EMC Belux. Read his blogs on www.floor161.com, or follow Arnaud on twitter: @ArnaudBacros.
