How Protected Is Your Data?

That’s what we asked organizations worldwide – and the results are in…

Achieving success in digital transformation is predicated on your data capital. It’s the foundation of your future: how you manage and protect it is essential to deriving value.

We recently conducted a global survey to gauge the data protection readiness of organizations. In the Dell EMC Global Data Protection Index study, over 2,000 IT decision-makers were interviewed in both public and private organizations of 250 or more employees, across three global regions, 18 countries and 11 industries. The results show a challenging landscape for organizations looking to get the most from their data.

Recognition vs. reality

Data is now regarded as an asset for most companies, with 92% of them seeing its potential value, and 36% of them recognizing it is extremely valuable and currently monetizing it. This has resulted in companies keeping substantially more data.

Worldwide, data is growing at a phenomenal rate: the Global Data Protection Index reports that between 2016 and 2018, the volume of global data rose from 1.45PB to 9.70PB. This has created a challenging landscape for data protection, as organizations struggle to keep up with data growth.

Protecting data against data loss is proving to be even more important than the threat of downtime. While more organizations experienced downtime than data loss in the previous 12 months (41% versus 28% respectively), the average cost per data loss incident was much higher – in fact, at an average cost of $996,000, nearly double than of unplanned systems downtime.

But has this recognition resulted in robust data protection measures? The answer seems to be: not for enough people. Almost two-thirds of respondents (63%) said they weren’t very confident they could meet their own service level objectives to fully recover their systems and data, while 84% think their current data protection solution will not enable them to meet all future business challenges.

Leaders and laggards

The Dell Global Data Protection Index grouped respondents into four categories, from Laggards, through Evaluators and Adopters, to Leaders. On average, Leaders have 18 times more data than Laggards, and are seven times more likely to be monetizing it. This explains why, for Leaders, the threat of data loss is so much greater: the average cost of data loss for them is almost 12 times higher than it is for Laggards.

In short, while Leaders are in better shape to avoid incidents, they are also more exposed, because their operations are more reliant on data.

Who’s in front?

The Global Data Protection Index ranks countries on the maturity of their approach to data protection, awarding organizations in each country more points for shorter recovery times, confidence in their infrastructure, modern data protection systems, and the extent to which they saw value in their data.

So – which countries came out on top? The answers may surprise you. To find out more, read the Dell Global Data Protection Index Ebook here. There is also a handy infographic – and a set of nurture emails for you to send customers.