Dell EMC: “Many companies don’t know how to adequately protect valuable data”.

Dutch IT decision makers know that data can potentially have a lot of value. However, most of them have difficulty in adequately protecting that data. This is shown by new research by Dell EMC among 2,200 IT decision-makers from both public and private organizations with more than 250 employees. One hundred respondents work for a Dutch company.

According to a study by Dell EMC, data in the Netherlands has grown by 768 percent since 2016. This concerns 5,38 petabyte (PB) in 2018 compared to 0,62 PB in 2016. 88 per cent of Dutch respondents said they recognise the potential value of that data. 30 percent already benefit financially from this.

The problem is that this data is not always well protected. For example, 83 percent of Dutch respondents said they had downtime in 2018, with 40 percent not being able to restore the data using their existing data protection solution. This is almost tripling compared to the 15 percent in 2016.

Causes

Seventy per cent also say they have at least two data protection suppliers. Organisations in the Netherlands with two suppliers had an average of 10 percent less risk of downtime in 2018. If this does happen, it was mainly due to a local disaster that affected the organisation in whole or in part, with consequences for data access (41%).

Also, data was irretrievably lost with the current protection method (34 percent), or companies were victims of ransomware (31 percent).

The costs of data loss are also high. On average, Dutch organisations lost 1.44 TB of data in the past twelve months, representing a price tag of EUR 765,142. The costs increase as the size increases, but the amounts also increase with the value of the data lost.

Challenges

Therefore, the vast majority of respondents say they have at least one challenge related to data protection. In the Netherlands it is 94 percent, worldwide it is 95 percent.

In the Netherlands, organisations mainly have problems with the complexity of the configuration and use of software or hardware for data protection (45 percent). 43 percent are also struggling with the ever-increasing cost of storing and managing backups due to rapid data growth.

Also, according to 42 percent, there is still a lack of data protection solution for new technologies. These include IoT (40 percent), data from artificial intelligence and machine learning (38 percent), and containers (38 percent).