Half of Companies Unprepared for Severe Data Loss
Every business knows that losing data can be catastrophic. Even a few minutes of downtime can result in missed opportunities, decreased productivity, and unhappy customers. This is why data backup and disaster recovery solutions are so important and why many businesses invest heavily in them.
Despite this, a new study from Arcserve has found that many businesses are still not adequately protected against data loss. Arcserve, a provider of data backup and disaster recovery solutions, found that 76% of respondents reported a severe loss of critical data in their company. Of that number, 45% had permanent data loss.
The research study also found that many companies could not maintain business continuity on time once data was lost or compromised. According to 83% of respondents, a 12-hour or less outage is acceptable for critical systems before a measurable economic impact.
However, only 52% of companies surveyed would be able to access their data within 12 hours after a severe loss. 29% said they couldn't get anything back for one day or more.
Arcserve highlights that companies must continuously update, test, and document their disaster recovery plan to build data resilience. At all levels in the company, the importance of protecting and recovering data should be elevated with specific goals. Data integrity, compliance, and SLAs should be at the core of a business's data backup and disaster recovery strategy.
The good thing is that 95% of respondents in the survey said their companies have a disaster recovery plan. However, only 24% deem the plan well documented, tested, and updated.
Additionally, 83% of respondents said their companies included data resilience in their strategies; however, only 23% have actively mature solutions that trigger progress with short- and long-term goals.
"Our annual survey reinforces the business imperative for organizations to implement a data resilience strategy that incorporates mature data backup and disaster recovery plans. We live in a world of growing ransomware attacks and frequent natural disasters. Any downtime from data loss can be destructive for a business from impacting sales to losing customer loyalty," said David Lenz, vice president for Asia Pacific at Arcserve.
He continued: "Arcserve aims to help businesses avoid costly business disasters and reputational damage from data loss with our best-in-class unified data resilience solutions suite. Our backup and recovery solutions, and immutable storage offering, ensure a near-zero impact on businesses."
Arcserve surveyed the experiences and attitudes of IT decision makers (ITDMs), who are at the center of their company's data loss prevention and data resilience strategy.
Image credit: iStockphoto/yanyong
