Data Loss
– Rich Recchio, Marketing Manager at Caronet, says:
All across the IT industry, CTO’s and IT Managers are constantly facing a slew of issues and concerns on a daily basis, ranging anywhere from managing multiple major projects, maintaining hardware, ensuring continuous uptime, and oh yeah, being the anchor point for their IT staff. While these daily affairs most likely contribute to the rising stress levels of IT professionals, there is no larger concern than the threat of losing data or failing to backup and secure mission-critical information.
Ensuring that your company is implementing an ample backup strategy is a critical piece of the IT management puzzle that prevents setting your business back days or months and more importantly costly downtime outages. According to EMC’s Global Data Protection Index report, enterprises globally are losing as much as $1.7 trillion through data loss and unplanned downtime. Yes, you read that right, $1.7 trillion. One would think that it’s safe to say these trends are a major concern for all IT professionals and that implementing a backup solution is a critical piece of their IT budget. However, EMC’s report suggests just the opposite, of the 3,300 IT decision-makers interviewed only 13% fall under the category of Leaders and Adopters of backup solutions for their respective organizations. While this is an alarming percentage it doesn’t mean that IT leaders aren’t concerned about the potential of data loss and downtime. Many leaders are having difficulties with protecting critical data and finding the appropriate solution for their businesses. Understanding the nuances of each data set and executing the best backup solution for the environment is essential to protecting yourself from threats.
Globally the U.S. spends the most on data protection at $32 million and it shows as 80% of American companies consider the protection of data loss critical to the success of their organizations. This is a positive sign for U.S. companies, but the astounding cost figure associated with data loss still leaves a sour taste in your mouth. This leads to the assumption that while budgets are being allocated towards the protection of data loss, the solution that is being implemented is not working efficiently enough. For example, over half of the organizations in the report have more than one data protection vendor. This would suggest that these businesses would have superior data protection by being safeguarded by more than one vendor, however, those businesses that use one vendor as their data protection lifeline reported to have 14% less data loss than those of multiple providers.
Although the U.S. has the highest spending on data protection in the world, it doesn’t always result in the best protection. Allocating copious amounts of money towards a solution without proper planning and vetting can lead to overspending while still being just as vulnerable to data loss and downtime as you were prior to implementing backup solutions. Ensuring that your company utilizes a single vendor opposed to multiple will allow you to decrease data loss as well as having one universal vendor to manage and work with, allowing them to fully understand the complete technology you have in place. By utilizing just one provider you need to make sure that you properly educate yourself with the vendor of choice and ensure that all critical elements of your backup solution are covered and secured. Features such as high frequency data protection down to the block level, on-site and off-site backup options, encryption capable and quick restores as well.
Not all businesses have the same amount of data volumes, technologies in place or budget’s for elaborate backup solutions. However, one thing is consistent between all organizations; data loss and downtime are expensive and can cripple an organization.
