Number of UK businesses unable to recover data after an incident doubles since 2016

Dell EMC has published the results of the third Global Data Protection Index, a global research study that reveals the state of data protection amongst organisations around the world. Specifically in the UK, the findings highlight the challenges and opportunities UK organisations face when looking to protect and monetise their data, with almost three quarters (69 percent) of survey respondents from the UK stating their organisation had experienced some type of disruption within a 12-month period, and 20 percent were unable to recover data using their existing data protection solution – double the amount (10 percent) in 2016.

 

In part, this could be due to the explosion in data growth experienced by UK organisations – growing at a rate 278 percent since 2016. The findings also reveal an impressive jump in data protection “adopters” – surging 51 percentage points since 2016, leading to 94 percent of UK respondents seeing the potential value of data and 44 percent already monetising it.

 

Complexity Leads to Costly Disruption

 

The sheer volume of data and its importance to business operations make data protection that much more challenging, particularly when this is managed across multiple vendors. In fact, 78 percent of UK respondents who use at least two data protection vendors, are 112 percent more likely to experience some type of disruption during the same 12-month period, compared to those with a single vendor.

 

Unplanned systems downtime was the most common type of disruption (45 percent) for those using two or more vendors, followed by ransomware attack that prevented access to data (24 percent) and inability to recover data from the current data protection method or product (also 24 percent).

 

Although unplanned systems downtime is more prevalent, data loss is far more expensive. For example, those who encountered downtime experienced 19 hours of downtime on average in the last 12 months, costing $509,881, while those who lost data, lost 5.46 terabytes on average with a price tag of $1.95 million.

 

Not only does the amount of data lost increase the price, but so does the value of data itself. It’s clear that UK organisations recognise this as 71 percent said they take data protection more seriously for categories of data that have the greatest monetary value.

 

Challenges Surrounding Data Protection

 

While those classified as data protection “adopters” sprang forward by nearly 51 percentage points (from 12 percent in 2016 to 63 percent in 2018) and “leaders” increased 7 percentage points (from 2 percent in 2016 to 9 percent in 2018), most UK businesses are struggling to implement a solution that adequately suits their needs.

 

With more than half (52 percent) mentioning they could not find suitable data protection solutions for cloud-native applications, followed by artificial intelligence and machine learning data, (43 percent) and IoT (32 percent). In addition, only 14 percent believe their current data protection solutions will be able to meet all future business challenges.

 

How Cloud Is Changing the Data Protection Landscape

 

To futureproof their organisation, UK organisations are looking to public cloud technologies for help against data loss. According to the Global Data Protection Index, UK public cloud use has increased from 19 percent of the total IT environment in respondents’ organisations in 2016 to 34 percent in 2018. In fact, nearly all (92 percent) of UK organisations are using public cloud as part of their data protection infrastructure. The top use cases for data protection within public cloud include:

1. Long-term data retention (35 percent)
2. Protecting specific SaaS apps (33 percent)
3. Cloud-enabled versions of on-premise data protection software to protect public clod workloads (33 percent)