September 30

Dell performed its annual survey of IT decision makers across public and private sector industries to compile the results in a Global Data Protection Index. Data has as crucial a role as ever in business life as an important part of growth and evolving business needs. That importance brings with it the need for protection. Survey results point toward two key areas impacting protection goals that are of increasing concern for professionals: managing data growth and keeping up with new technologies, and the increasing risk of data loss from cyberthreats such as attacks and ransomware.

Protecting amounts of business data that are not only growing but being used in different ways and places is a point of growing concern. As is regularly reported, the world’s data continues to grow, and protecting all that expanded storage is a challenge. It requires system resilience and backup procedures across a number of areas of business operations. But what if IT pros and business workers aren’t confident in a company’s ability to recover from disasters? The worries are mounting on multiple fronts: the almost ever-present threat of downtime from data loss due to failures, a growing landscape of external threats from things like ransomware, and the effects of a workforce being more dispersed, working from home, adding risk vectors for data that is accessed from from a broader array of points including remotely.

The Data Protection Index gives a good snapshot of the mood of IT workers and highlights the concerns about being ready in the face of a continually transforming working environment and business data landscape. We’ve picked some of the best findings to highlight for you:

Disruptive Events

Illustration: person looks at cellphone, alert! icon beams towards them.

64% concerned they will have a disruptive event in the next 12 months

Disruptive events, encompassing everything from unforeseen systems downtime, to cyberattacks and data loss incidents, are the main threats to data and a continually increasing trend the last number of years. Incident numbers are not abating and concern about them isn’t either.

Illustration: person with a look of alarm on their face reaches into a filing cabinet drawer for a folder. Data loss?!

35% confident that systems/data can be fully recovered after a data loss incident

Down 2% from results collected in 2018, protecting data and responding to incidents is believed to be a risk. Areas where survey respondents expressed lack of confidence include being compliant with regional data governance regulations and their organization being able to meet backup and recovery service level objectives.

Cyber Threats

74% agree there is increased exposure to data loss from cyber threats with the growth of employees working from home

Illustration: nefarious character with burglar mask holds a symbolic file/organization tree up with the top placeholder being a $ dollar sign indicating ransom.

The threat of a cyber attack looms over organizations more than ever. Unauthorized data access, malware and ransomware threats all continue to persist. With an accelerated move towards remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the impression that data loss threats have increased is high.

67% not very confident that critical data can be recovered in the event of a destructive cyberattack

Adding to concern about organizations’ ability to cope with malware and ransomware threats is a lack of confidence that after a destructive cybersecurity incident all critical business data would be recovered.

Emerging Tech & Data Clouds

82% think data protection solutions won’t be able to meet all future business challenges

Illustration: character reaches up to grab into a bunch of symbols laid out in a pile from chat icons to a star to file folders and document icons. A mess.

As the digital landscape evolves, introducing new technologies is of ongoing interest in all organizations. New and emerging tech like SaaS apps, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Internet of Things endpoints and 5G and cloud edge infrastructure continue to see investment growth. Various ‘as-a-service’ offerings like storage and backup are being prioritized in many organizations (41%-47%) but the lack of confidence in abilities is telling. The range of environments where these applications are being deployed further complicates the data landscape and protection challenges.

41%-46% have backup tools in place either on premises or via services to protect data in multiple cloud environments

While many organizations are utilizing data across multiple cloud environments including virtualized VMware environments, the backup solutions in place to protect them come via an assortment of solutions sometimes not specific to them. This leaves over 50% of organizations either leaving data protection up to the various providers or planning to upgrade and put in place solutions to account for data loss and protection.


The Dell survey captures the feeling across IT departments of the complexities of protecting a data landscape that continues to grow. The volume of data stored across different on-premises and cloud environments that needs to be protected is faced with compounded difficulties from factors like increased cybersecurity risks from ransomware and an uptick in remote work due to the pandemic. Confidence is low across the board in the ability to prevent disruption or recover business data from incidents.

The annual report insights draw attention to the need for focus on backup strategies and recovery readiness which should include providers and services being in place to keep business working in challenging times. CBL remains a committed and trusted service partner when data loss incidents occur. Increase your recovery confidence by getting help from the experts.

Further Reading/Sources


Illustrations based on work by Carlos paywithlayers.

Category: business, data loss prevention

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments

Commenting is closed for this article.