EMChas published the results of new research revealing that organizations are failing to appreciate the growing challenges of protecting their data and, as a result, are experiencing the economic impact of data loss. New findings from the EMC® Global Data Protection Index 2016, an independent study by Vanson Bourne of enterprise backup in 18 countries around the world, revealed that, while businesses have been successful in reducing the impact of the four biggest traditional data loss risks1, they are unprepared for new, emerging threats, which are taking their toll instead. When compared to the EMC Global Data Protection Index 2014, 13% more businesses experienced data loss or disruption in the last 12 months, costing them an average of US$914,000.
EMC commissioned the updated research to help organizations recognize and prepare for the rapidly changing landscape of threats to enterprise data. Survey results from the EMC Global Data Protection Index 2016 identified the following three major challenges to modern data protection:
1) Threats to Protection Data
Nearly a quarter (23%) of businesses surveyed had experienced data loss or unplanned systems disruption due to an external security breach and that number increased to over one third (36%) when taking internal breaches into account. Businesses are increasingly facing threats not just to their primary data, but also to their backup and protection data. Whether combating cyber extortionists demanding cash to unlock data encrypted by ransomware, or other risks posed to backup and protection data, businesses need to find solutions that put their ‘data of last resort’ beyond harm’s reach.
To address this threat, EMC is launching a new Isolated Recovery Solutions™ line to help organizations “air gap” a protection instance of their data from the networked enterprise. Based on EMC VMAX®, EMC Data Domain® and EMC Professional Services technologies, EMC’s Isolated Recovery Solutions line is designed to enable businesses to create a virtual panic room for their most valuable data, isolating it from networked systems that could be compromised in a cyber attack. If needed, the isolated instance of protection data can be scanned and restored safely within minutes, offering a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) superior to tape-based backup. Isolated Recovery Solutions offerings based on EMC XtremIO®, EMC Unity™ and EMC Isilon® technologies will be available in the near future.
2) Threats to Data in the Cloud
More than 80% of survey respondents indicated that their organizations will run at least part of eight key business applications2 in the public cloud in the next two years; yet less than half said they protect cloud data against corruption and less than half against deletion. More than half said they already run their email solution in the public cloud. And, overall, respondents already had, on average 30% of their IT environments based in the public cloud.
Because SaaS application providers often won’t protect against accidental loss or deletion by an employee, EMC believes it is critical for organizations to include cloud applications in their overall data protection strategies. EMC offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions for cloud-to-cloud and on-premise-to-cloud data protection to facilitate this. These include: Data Domain Cloud Tier technology, which allows seamless tiering to public clouds such as Virtustream® Storage Cloud; Spanning Backup® technology by EMC, which enables businesses to protect data in applications such as Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.com; and Mozy® online backup service by EMC, which empowers businesses to protect endpoint data to the public cloud.
3) Evolving Protection Needs
More than 70% of organizations surveyed are not very confident they could fully recover their systems or data in the event of data loss or unexpected systems downtime. And confidence also suffers when it comes to data center performance, with 73% declaring they are not very confident their solutions will be able to keep pace with the faster performance and new capabilities of flash storage.
