THE Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) findings reveal organisations are facing several data protection challenges driven by the constant threat of ransomware, the consumption of emerging technologies, and data growth.
The survey of 1,000 global IT decision makers shows organisations are combatting continued data growth and increased data protection complexities. The study found that organisations are managing more than 10 times the amount of data than they did five years ago – from 1.45 petabytes in 2016 to 14.6 petabytes in 2021.
Additionally, 72% of South Africa respondents are concerned their organisation’s existing data protection solutions won’t be able to meet all future business challenges.
These concerns appear to be well-founded, with 20% of South African respondents reporting data loss in the last year and nearly half (44%) experiencing unplanned system downtime.
Other findings include:
- 68% of those polled agree they have increased exposure to data loss from cyber threats with the growth of employees working from home.
- Almost half, 46% lack confidence that all their business-critical data can be recovered in the event of a destructive cyberattack or data loss. This is however better than the global average of 67%.
- 12% percent believe emerging technologies—such as cloud-native applications, Kubernetes containers, artificial intelligence and machine learning pose a risk to data protection, and the lack of data protection solutions for newer technologies was a top-three challenge for organisations.
Doug Woolley, Managing Director, Dell Technologies South Africa said that to help address these rising – and seemingly inevitable – issues, the company is introducing new software and services to accelerate virtual machine (VM) backup data availability, simplify management of large data sets, and maintain business continuity while alleviating dependencies on day-to-day cyber recovery operations.
“As the digital economy grows so too do data volumes and, in turn, the cyber threat surface area. At Dell Technologies we provide our customers with software and managed services and a single point of call, reducing risk and providing peace of mind that their business-critical data is protected from edge to core to cloud.
“Our customers can feel confident that through our single-vendor approach, all facets of their data landscape will be taken into account and protected,” Woolley said. – GeekWire.co.za
