4.6 million employees lose employer data due to malfunctioning personal technology

New research from data recovery specialists1, Kroll Ontrack, suggests 4.6 million UK employees2 have lost work-related data in the last 12 months due to corrupted and malfunctioning personal devices or cloud services.

Kroll Ontrack warns that this is a significant risk to businesses, and could be much worse as one in three (33 per cent), or 10 million UK employees, use personal devices or cloud services to store employer data. Without effective data usage guidelines, businesses risk losing control of their critical data and open themselves up to inefficiencies and potential legal action through data protection failures.

Paul Le Messurier, Programme and Operations Manager at Kroll Ontrack said of the findings: “It is interesting to see that data loss from personal mobile devices has doubled in two years from seven per cent in 20123 to 13 per cent this year, reflecting the proliferation of mobile devices in the corporate environment.

Businesses must begin adapting to the future working environment where employees access files through a number of channels, not all of which will be immediately vetted by the employer. IT decision makers must accept that this trend will continue and data loss from a wider array of devices will occur as new technology is released to consumers. We would urge businesses to protect critical business data through implementing clear data usage, backup and security guidelines.”

Kroll Ontrack’s research shows that successful recoveries of work data have increased in the past two years across home desktops (11 per cent to 19 per cent) and personal mobile devices (5 per cent to 8 per cent). However, successful recoveries have decreased for laptops and tablets (20 per cent to 17 per cent). Whilst the situation is improving overall, it is still alarming that only two fifths (43 per cent) of employees were able to recover lost work data from their personal devices in the last 12 months.