The Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot reveals that organisations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) on average are managing almost 73 per cent more data than they were a year ago
With this surge in data come inherent challenges. The vast majority (81 per cent) of respondents reported their current data protection solutions will not meet all of their future business needs.
The Snapshot, follow-on to the biennial Global Data Protection Index, surveyed 1,000 IT decision-makers across 15 countries at public and private organisations with 250+ employees about the impact these challenges and advanced technologies have on data protection readiness. The findings also show positive progress as an increasing number of organisations – 79 per cent in 2019, up from 70 per cent in 2018 – see their data as valuable and are currently extracting value or plan to in the future.
Michel Nader, senior director, data protection solutions – MERAT at Dell Technologies, said, “The data era is changing how organisations think about, monetise and protects data as the speed of innovation has opened the world to new opportunities but has also increased risks.
“Defining the right strategies is therefore critical to protect an organisation’s most critical assets and it’s therefore important to remember that whatever threat trends proliferate, business leaders cannot overlook the role security and risk management play in their overall strategy.”
Costly disruptions rise at alarming rates
According to the study, organisations are now managing 16.40 petabytes (PB) of data, a 73 per cent increase since the average 9.47PB in 2018, and a 975 per cent increase since organisations were managing 1.53PB in 2016. The largest threat to all this data seems to be the growing number of disruptive events, from cyber-attacks to data loss to systems downtime. The majority of organisations (80 per cent in 2019 compared to 77 per cent in 2018) suffered a disruptive event in the last 12 months. And, an additional 60 per cent fear their organisation will experience a disruptive event in the next 12 months.
Even more concerning is the finding that organisations using more than one data protection vendor are approximately two times more vulnerable to a cyber incident that prevents access to their data (35 per cent of those using two or more vendors versus 20 per cent of those using only one vendor). But the use of multiple data protection vendors is on the rise with 78 per cent of organisations choosing to deploy data protection solutions from two or more providers, up 20 percentage points since 2016.
The cost of disruption is also increasing at an alarming rate. The average cost of downtime surged by 93 per cent from 2018 to 2019, resulting in an estimated total cost of US$1,000,390 in 2019, up from US$517,872 in 2018. The estimated cost of data loss, however, decreased from US$999,338 in 2018 to US$915, 994 in 2019. The costs of disruption are significantly higher for those organisations using more than one data protection vendor – nearly two times higher downtime-related costs and almost five times higher data loss costs, on average.
Emerging technologies challenge data protection solutions
As emerging technologies continue to advance and shape the digital landscape, organisations are learning how to use these technologies for better business outcomes. The study reports that almost all regional organisations are making some level of investment in newer or emerging technologies. Yet, nearly three-quarters (69 per cent) of respondents believe these emerging technologies create more data protection complexity while (56 per cent) state that emerging technologies pose a risk to data protection.
Businesses are taking a combination of cloud approaches when deploying new business applications and protecting workloads such as containers and cloud-native and SaaS applications. The findings show that organisations prefer public cloud/SaaS (36 per cent), hybrid cloud (39 per cent) and private cloud (39 per cent) as deployment environments for newer applications such as these. Also, 86 per cent of organisations surveyed say it is mandatory or extremely important for data protection providers to protect cloud-native applications.
“These findings prove that data protection needs to be central to a company’s business strategy,” said Nader. “As the data landscape grows more complex, organisations need nimble, sustainable data protection strategies that can scale in a multi-platform, multi-cloud world.”
