Dell: Businesses Struggling to Protect Massive Amounts of Data

Businesses on average are managing nearly 40% more data than they were a year ago, while the estimated total cost of data loss has increased to more than $1 million per organization.

That’s according to Dell Technologies‘ Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot. The snapshot surveyed 1,000 IT decision makers across 15 countries at public and private organizations with more than 250 employees about the impact these challenges and advanced technologies have on data-protection readiness.

Dell EMC’s Ruya Atac-Barrett

Ruya Atac-Barrett, vice president of data protection marketing at Dell EMC, tells us as organizations begin to understand the value of their data and the importance of protecting it, they will hopefully start to look for more control over their data-protection processes.

“The study reported 81% of respondents said that their organization’s existing data protection solution(s) would not be able to meet all future business challenges,” she said. “That said, organizations will need to look for simple, easy-to-manage solutions from a single vendor that enable greater control with less wasted time. Also important to note, these solutions need to provide the global scale organizations require to protect applications and data wherever they are deployed.”

The more aware and conscious organizations are about the need for data-protection readiness, the more informed they will be selecting a vendor, Atac-Barrett said. Being more in tune with the state of the industry, organizations are primed to meet their organizational concerns.

The majority of respondents indicated a lack of confidence in their solutions to help them recover data following a cyberattack, adhering to compliance regulations, meeting application service levels and preparing for future data protection business requirements, she said.

“This presents a significant opportunity for our channel partners and MSP communities to help customers consolidate and simplify their data-protection environment to improve data protection and recovery service-level agreements, meet compliance objectives, enhance their cyber resiliency capabilities, lower costs and simplify IT so that organizations can spend less time on IT management and more time focusing on innovation,” Atac-Barrett said.

More than half of organizations struggle to find adequate data protection solutions for emerging technologies like 5G and edge infrastructure (67%), and AI and ML platforms (64%), according to the snapshot.

Organizations now are managing 13.53 petabytes (PB) of data. The biggest threat to all of this data seems to be the growing number of disruptive events, from cyberattacks, to data loss and systems downtime. The majority of organizations suffered a disruptive event in the last 12 months, and an additional 68% fear their organization will experience a disruptive event in the next 12 months.

The costs associated with data loss are significantly higher for those organizations using more than one data protection vendor — nearly twice the downtime-related costs and almost five-times higher data loss costs, on average.

“One of the main reasons for the increasing cost of data loss is the increasing amount of data itself,” Atac-Barrett said. “The more data that is lost, the higher the associated costs will be; therefore, organizations must update their data protection strategy, and adopt proven and modern solutions that can automatically discover and protect new workloads (virtual, containers, cloud-native, SaaS) as they are deployed across …

… edge, core and cloud environments. Likewise, organizations need data protection solutions that provide the elastic performance and global scale organizations need to ensure that mission-critical workloads and data remain protected and secure as they grow across hybrid, multicloud environments.”

In terms of data protection solutions, respondents shared a lack of confidence in the following areas:

Businesses are taking a combination of cloud approaches when deploying new business applications and protecting workloads such as containers and cloud-native and SaaS applications. The findings show that organizations prefer public cloud/SaaS (43%), hybrid cloud (42%) and private cloud (39%) as deployment environments for newer applications such as these. Also, 85% of organizations surveyed said it is mandatory or extremely important for data-protection providers to protect cloud-native applications.

As more data moves to, through and around edge environments, many respondents said cloud-based backups are preferred, with 62% citing private cloud and 49% citing public cloud as their approach for managing and protecting data created in edge locations.

“Having a strategy and plan to protect your company’s data is the most important do for any organization,” Atac-Barrett said. “In fact, organizations should walk away from this report knowing that data protection is essential to their business health, growth and IT transformation. One of the biggest don’ts … is to assume that data in the cloud is automatically being protected by the cloud service provider. Sixty-three percent of organizations surveyed stated that they do not have a separate contract with their cloud service provider to protect all of their workloads. This suggests that some applications and data in the cloud is going unprotected, making organizations vulnerable to extended downtime and data loss.”