Actifio has announced 'dramatic' growth in the number of enterprise customers using Actifio to better control access to their confidential data, particularly throughout their data protection and application development processes. This comes as research by IDC, commissioned by Actifio, has found many enterprises are still struggling to control their critical data, with two-thirds of enterprises failing to meet best practice standards for data control. Keeping enterprise data both safe and accessible is a complex balancing act made all the more difficult by the geometric growth rate of production data. This data is difficult to keep track of, let alone protect. Each added physical copy increases the “surface area of attack” for this data, creating additional opportunities for the wrong people to get access.
- Two-thirds of enterprises fail to meet best practice standards for data control and few are likely to be consistent across the full spectrum of data security policies.
- 77 percent of surveyed organisations fail to mask sensitive data during the test/development phase, which significantly increases the threat of a data breach.
- Government performs best overall at implementing data control policies; the Education sector is the weakest.
- The CIO is central to the implementation of data control/security policies – policies are only applied on an ad-hoc basis 34 percent of the time
- A typical organisation holds 375 data copies, with each copy carrying sensitive information and therefore an increased risk of attack
The white paper contains insights from a survey of senior executives at 429 mid-to-large scale enterprises across five industry sectors – Government, Financial, Education, Healthcare and Retail, and focuses on current trends related to data access, management, masking, copy proliferation and tracking. To view the IDC white paper in full, download it here. Actifio’s Virtual Data Pipeline™ technology provides a holistic approach to data management that enables large organisations to capture data directly from production applications, manage a single “golden master” copy of that data in their most secure environment, and then use virtual copies to maintain both accessibility and control.
“Our research clearly identified two major challenges faced by IT executives - the copy data proliferation problem and the copy data access problem,” said Phil Goodwin, research director, Storage Systems and Software of IDC. “Copy data is costly, and introduces risk when it needs to be accessed. Organisations need solutions that can automate copy data management and subsequently reduce risk and cost in the enterprise and public sector environments; manual efforts are simply insufficient”
The enterprise copy data access problem is simply too large and broad for IT organisations to handle manually. By 2018, IDC estimates copy data will be cost IT organisations $50.63 billion and currently consumes up to 60 percent of the IT storage hardware and infrastructure budget.
“The truth is most companies are have no idea how many copies of a given data set are floating around in their infrastructure or in the cloud,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Actifio. “If you don’t know how many copies you have you don’t know where they are, and if you don’t know where they are you can’t tell who has access to them. Actifio gives customers a single system of record to take control of their secondary data, and more and more CIOs are taking a proactive approach to reduce the threat of exposure.”
