The survey comes from Dell Technologies. The findings relate to the company’s Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot. The survey polled some 1,000 IT decision makers across 15 countries and 14 industries. The key outcome is that the average cost of data loss was $1 million per year.
The research also found that when deploying new applications, most organizations favor a cloud-based deployment model. In terms of what the model looks like, the top three are: public cloud, hybrid cloud, and private cloud.
The most common option is the public cloud. In relation tis form of data storage, 56 percent of organizations expressed the view that one of the primary benefits of deploying applications into the public cloud is more reliable data protection.
While public cloud options remain popular, the top three newer technologies organizations are investing in are cloud-native applications (raised by 58 percent of the IT people surveyed), AI/ML (mentioned by 53 percent), and SaaS applications (stated by 51 percent).
While there are many advantages clustered around new technologies, there are also complications. With this regard, 71 percent of IT professionals believe that emerging technologies create more complexity when it comes to data protection. The typical organization is now managing 13.53 petabytes (PB) of data.
According to Dell’s Beth Phalen, to address such creeping complexity: “organizations need simple, reliable, efficient, scalable and more automated solutions for protecting applications and data.”
She adds that this is “regardless of the platform (physical, virtual, containers, cloud-native, SaaS) or of the environments that workloads are deployed into (edge, core, multi-cloud).”
The survey also found that 60 percent of those organizations using cloud-native applications are struggling to find adequate data protection. The emerging technologies associated with data protection concerns were called out as: 5G and cloud edge infrastructure; AI and ML platforms; cloud-native applications; IoT and end point and robotic process automation.
The key issues relating to data that concern IT professionals the most are: Recovering data from cyber-attacks; recovering data from a data loss incident; meeting compliance with regional data governance regulations; and meeting backup and recovery service level objectives.
