New findings from the EMC Global Data Protection Index 2016, an independent study by Vanson Bourne of enterprise backup in 18 countries around the world, revealed that, while businesses have been successful in reducing the impact of the four biggest traditional data loss risks, they are unprepared for new, emerging threats, which are taking their toll instead. When compared to the EMC Global Data Protection Index 2014, 13% more businesses experienced data loss or disruption in the last 12 months, costing them an average of $914,000.
EMC commissioned the updated research to help organisations recognise and prepare for the rapidly changing landscape of threats to enterprise data. Survey results from the EMC Global Data Protection Index 2016 identified the following three major challenges to modern data protection.
Threats to protection data
Nearly a quarter of businesses surveyed had experienced data loss or unplanned systems disruption due to an external security breach and that number increased to over one third when taking internal breaches into account. Businesses are increasingly facing threats not just to their primary data, but also to their backup and protection data. Whether combating cyber extortionists demanding cash to unlock data encrypted by ransomware, or other risks posed to backup and protection data, businesses need to find solutions that put their data of last resort beyond harm’s reach.
Threats to data in the cloud
More than 80% of survey respondents indicated that their organisations will run at least part of eight key business applications in the public cloud in the next two years, yet less than half said they protect cloud data against corruption and less than half against deletion. More than half said they already run their email solution in the public cloud. And, overall, respondents already had, on average 30% of their IT environments based in the public cloud.
Because Saas application providers often will not protect against accidental loss or deletion by an employee, EMC believes it is critical for organisations to include cloud applications in their overall data protection strategies.
Evolving protection needs
More than 70% of organisations surveyed are not very confident they could fully recover their systems or data in the event of data loss or unexpected systems downtime. And confidence also suffers when it comes to data centre performance, with 73% declaring they are not very confident their solutions will be able to keep pace with the faster performance and new capabilities of flash storage.
EMC has a portfolio of data protection solutions that it constantly evolves to deliver greater benefits to its customers. Over the past year, EMC enhanced its portfolio with new solutions, including the following.
EMC ProtectPoint
Enables businesses to manage the growing challenge of protecting flash environments by protecting directly from primary to protection storage with no traditional backup infrastructure, cutting backup times by 10x and restore times by 20x.
EMC zDP
The first-to-market scale-out automated snapshot solution for mainframe storage that slashes mainframe recovery point objectives by up to 144x.
EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management
A modern management platform that discovers, automates, and optimises organisations’ copy data.
DataDomain Virtual Edition
A software-defined version of EMC’s trusted protection storage which can reduce storage requirements by 10-30x and includes DD Boost, to speed backups by up to 50%.
VCE Data Protection Appliances
Built with Data Domain and EMC data protection software, designed to cut deployment time by 75%.
David Goulden, Chief Executive Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure said, “Our customers are facing a rapidly evolving data protection landscape on a number of fronts, whether it’s to protect modern cloud computing environments or to shield against devastating cyber attacks. Our research shows that many businesses are unaware of the potential impact and are failing to plan for them, which is a threat in itself.”