Cyber Attacks and Disruptive Events Are on the Rise

Dell's Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot reveals that organizations on average are managing almost 40% more data than they were a year ago. With this surge in data comes inherent challenges. The vast majority (81%) of respondents reported their current data protection solutions will not meet all of their future business needs.

The Snapshot surveyed 1,000 IT decision makers across 15 countries at public and private organizations with 250+ employees about the impact these challenges and advanced technologies have on data protection readiness. The findings also show positive progress as an increasing number of organizations, 80% in 2019, up from 74% in 2018, see their data as valuable and are currently extracting value or plan to in the future.

According to the study, organizations are now managing 13.53 petabytes (PB) of data, nearly a 40% increase compared with 2018, and an 831% compared with 2016. The largest threat to all this data seems to be the growing number of disruptive events, from cyber-attacks to data loss and systems downtime. The majority of organizations (82%) suffered a disruptive event in the last 12 months. Additional 68% fear their organization will experience a disruptive event in the next 12 months.

Even more concerning is the finding that organizations using more than one data protection vendor are approximately two times more vulnerable to a cyber incident that prevents access to their data (39% of those using two or more vendors versus 20% of those using only one vendor). But, the use of multiple data protection vendors is on the rise with 80% of organizations choosing to deploy data protection solutions from two or more providers, up 20 percentage points since 2016.

The cost of disruption is also increasing at an alarming rate. The average cost of downtime surged by 54% from 2018 to 2019, resulting in an estimated total cost of $810,018 in 2019, up from $526,845 in 2018. The estimated cost of data loss also increased from $995,613 in 2018 to $1,013,075 in 2019. These costs are significantly higher for those organizations using more than one data protection vendor that have nearly two times higher downtime-related costs and almost five times higher data loss costs, on average.

As emerging technologies continue to advance, organizations are learning how to use these technologies for better business outcomes. The study reports that almost all organizations are making some level of investment in newer or emerging technologies, with the top five being: cloud-native applications (58%); AI and ML (53%); SaaS applications (51%); 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (49%); and IoT/end point (36%).

Yet, nearly three-quarters (71%) of respondents believe these emerging technologies create more data protection complexity while 61% state that emerging technologies pose a risk to data protection. More than half of those using newer or emerging technologies are struggling to find adequate data protection solutions for these technologies.

The study also found that 81% of respondents believe their organizations’ existing data protection solutions will not be able to meet all future business challenges. Respondents shared a lack of confidence in recovering data from cyber-attacks (69%) or a data loss incident (64%), meeting compliance with regional data governance regulations (62%) and meeting backup and recovery service level objectives (62%).