Canadian Security Magazine

Dell EMC says only 11% of bizs believe data protection solutions adequate for future

By Staff   

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TORONTO – Dell EMC has announced the results of the third Global Data Protection Index, revealing a jump in data protection adopters of nearly 50% since 2016 worldwide.

Dell EMC says the research, which surveyed 2,200 IT decision makers from both public and private organizations with 250+ employees across 18 countries and 11 industries, presents information on the state of data protection and the maturity of data protection strategies. Specifically, the index uncovered an increase in the average amount of data managed – from 1.45 petabytes (PB) in 2016 to 9.70PB in 2018 – and a high awareness of the value of data.

According to the report, in Canada, 97% of respondents see the potential value of data and 33% are already monetizing their data. However, most respondents are struggling to properly protect their data. Dell EMC says the combination of these factors is driving many of the survey’s findings. 
 
Disruption incidents are costly 

The report says more than three-quarters (76%) of respondents globally experienced some type of disruption within a 12-month period, and 27% were unable to recover data using their existing data protection solution. In Canada, 72% of businesses experienced a disruption in the last 12 months, and 16% percent experienced irreparable data loss. 

Coincidently, 76% of respondents worldwide are also using at least two data protection vendors, which makes them 35% more likely to experience some type of disruption during the same 12-month period, compared to those with a single vendor. Canada is below average, experiencing less disruption with only 71% of businesses using two or more data protection vendors and making them 41% more likely to experience some type of disruption during a 12-month period. Unplanned systems downtime was the most common type of disruption for Canadian businesses (54%) using two or more vendors, followed by ransomware attack that prevented access to data (17%) and data loss (39%).
 
Dell EMC argues that although unplanned systems downtime is more prevalent, data loss is far more expensive. For example, those in Canada who encountered downtime experienced 25 hours of downtime compared to the global average of 20 hours in the last 12 months, costing Canadians approximately $584,615, while those who lost data lost 6.15 terabytes on average with a price tag of nearly $1.2 million. Additionally, many of those who experienced a disruption also indicated it had far-reaching business impacts from customer trust to brand equity to employee productivity. 73% of Canadian organizations said they take data protection more seriously for categories of data that have the greatest monetary value. 
 
Challenges surrounding data protection
 
According to the report, the majority (88%) of Canadian respondents face at least one challenge in relation to data protection. The top three challenges Canadian business face include:
 
1. The lack of data protection solutions for emerging technologies (ranked 2nd globally)
2. Ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR, the EU’s new data protection rules (ranked 3rd globally)
3. Ballooning costs of storing and managing backup copies due to rapid data growth (ranked 1st globally)

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Also, nearly half of Canadian businesses said they could not find suitable data protection solutions for artificial intelligence and machine learning data, which is just below the global average of 51%, while cloud-native applications and IoT appear to be more of a struggle to protect for Canadian businesses, representing 61% and 25% compared to 47% and 40% globally.

Only 11% of Canadian businesses, compared to 16% globally, believe their current data protection solutions will be able to meet all future business challenges.
 
Cloud is changing the data protection landscape

According to the report, public cloud use has increased from 28% of the total IT environment in respondents’ organizations in 2016 to 40% in 2018, on average. Nearly all (98%) organizations using public cloud are also leveraging it as part of their data protection infrastructure, including Canada at 97%.
 
The top use cases in Canada for data protection within public cloud include:
 
1. Cloud-enabled versions of on-premises data protection software to protect public cloud workloads (ranked 4th globally)
2. Protecting specific SaaS apps (ranked 3rd globally)
3. Backup of on-premises workloads/data (ranked 2nd globally)
4. Long term retention (not ranked in the top 5 globally)
5. Archiving (not ranked in the top 5 globally) 

65% of Canadian respondents named scalability options as important. Specifically, 39% cited the impact of data protection infrastructure or services required to protect at scale, while 42% cited the ability to scale services as public cloud workloads increase.
 


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