£10.5 billion lost per year from data loss and downtime

EMC Corporation has announced the findings of a new global data protection study that reveals that data loss and downtime cost enterprises across the globe, $1.7 trillion in the last twelve months, or the equivalent of nearly 50% of Germany’s GDP. In the UK, this figure is £10.5 billion. Data loss is up by 400% since 2012 while, surprisingly, 78% of UK organisations are still not fully confident in their ability to recover after a disruption.

EMC® Global Data Protection Index, conducted by Vanson Bourne, surveyed 3,300 IT decision makers from mid-size to enterprise-class businesses across 24 countries.

Impact of Data Loss and Downtime
The good news is that the number of data loss incidents is decreasing overall. However, the volume of data lost during an incident is growing exponentially:
· 67% of enterprises surveyed experienced data loss or downtime in the last 12 months (60% suffered downtime in the UK and 23% suffered data loss in the UK)
· Other commercial consequences of disruptions were loss of revenue (34% in the UK) and loss of customer confidence/loyalty (29% in the UK)

New Wave of Data Protection Challenges
Business trends, such as big data, mobile and hybrid cloud create new challenges for data protection:
· 87% of UK businesses lack a disaster recovery plan for hybrid cloud applications, 80% for mobile devices and 76% for data lakes
· In fact, 54% rated mobile devices as ‘difficult to protect’ (33% said big data and 27% said hybrid cloud)
· With 24% of all primary data located in some form of cloud storage, this could result in substantial loss

The Protection Paradox
Adopting advanced data protection technologies dramatically decreases the likelihood of disruption. And, many companies turn to multiple IT vendors to solve their data protection challenges. However, a siloed approach to deploying these can increase risks:
· Globally, enterprises that have not deployed a continuous availability strategy were twice as likely to suffer data loss as those that had.
· Businesses using three or more vendors to supply data protection solutions lost three times as much data as those who unified their data protection strategy around a single vendor
· Those enterprises with three vendors were also likely to spend an average of $3 million more on their data protection infrastructure compared to those with just one
· 75% of UK companies with three or more vendors have experienced unplanned systems downtime within the last 12 months

The Maturity Matrix
EMC Data Protection Index survey participants were award points based on their responses, ranking their data protection maturity in one of four categories (see methodology for further details):
· The vast majority -- 87% -- of UK businesses rank in the bottom two categories for data protection maturity
· In the UK 13% rank ahead of the curve, with 11% classed as “Adopters” and 2% considered “Leaders”
· China has the greatest number of companies ahead of the curve (30%) and the UAE the least (0%)