Dell EMC: Number of UK businesses unable to recover data after an incident has doubled since 2016
Over two thirds (69%) of UK organisations have experienced some type of disruption when looking to protect and monetise their data, according to a new report by Dell EMC.
In its Global Data Protection Index, Dell EMC also highlighted how one fifth (20%) were unable to recover data using their existing data protection - double the amount (10%) in 2016.
“The UK is witnessing an explosion in the growth of data, but how this data is managed and protected impacts the value organisations can extract from it”, said Rob Lamb, Chief Technology Officer, UKI Dell EMC.
“As organisations race to transform themselves to be better prepared for the digital age, cloud technologies will play a critical role in the protection of an organisations’ infrastructure, and the data it holds.”
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The report also pointed out how almost all (94%) of UK respondents see the potential value of data - with 44% already monetising it.
The findings also reveal an impressive jump in data protection “adopters” – surging 51 percentage points since 2016.
Data protection has become increasingly complex due to the sheer volume of data, particularly when its managed by multiple technology vendors.
In fact, the report found that 78% of UK respondents who use at least two data protection vendors, are 112% more likely to experience some type of disruption during the same 12-month period, compared to those with a single vendor.
Additionally, 35% of those surveyed in the UK said they are struggling to find suitable data protection solutions for newer technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
To tackle the mounting challenge of data protection, UK organisations are increasingly looking to public cloud technologies to prevent data loss.
According to Dell EMC’s report, UK public cloud use has increased from 19% of the total IT environment in respondents’ organisations in 2016 to 34 % in 2018.
In fact, nearly all (92%) of UK organisations are using public cloud as part of their data protection infrastructure.
Gigabit spoke to Rob Lamb, Chief Technology Officer, UKI Dell EMC, to find out more about the study:
What are the biggest challenges facing businesses when it comes to data protection and why?
The growth in the volume of data under management at over 250% in the UK since 2016 is staggering, particularly given that just 44% of businesses have recognised the value of data and are monetising it.
Given the cost and complexity of storing and protecting this data, the research suggests that businesses don’t have clear policies for what they store, how they protect it and how they use it to fuel their growth.
Not everything needs the same protection or retention so businesses need the ability to categorise data in order to apply the appropriate data protection approach.
If you don’t develop robust, repeatable approaches to data categorisation and selection, you’ll end up keeping everything forever.
In the event of a failure, you’ll be faced with having to recover everything, rather than just the critical/valuable data sets, making your recovery time unrealistic or even impossible.
What advice would you give a firm trying to protect their data?
Businesses should approach data protection as a business problem, not an IT problem.
To do this, they address data classification and tiering processes first based on areas like; how critical is the data; how long does it need to be retained for; how quickly must it be recovered in the event of a failure; when does its value/criticality change.
Only once they understand these factors can they start to develop an appropriate protection strategy and define the architecture and tooling they need.
This should be policy-based and automated with data protection systems because relying on manual activity is impossible to maintain at scale, and their data protection will quickly become flawed.
