It is said that people can hardly perceive the numbers above million but this is how much organizations are estimated to spend on data protection annually – one billion or a one thousand million dollars.
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The research published on June 26th in Symantec’s “State of Information” review included 4,506 global organizations in over 36 countries. It reports that the amount of corporate data is higher than ever before and so is the amount of money organizations spend on their protection. On average, big organizations spend $38 million on data protection and storage, while small to middle size businesses spend around $332,000. 30% of the respondents said the data were stored inside and outside the organization.
Data value and costs
It might seem somewhat paradoxical, but per-employee costs of data storage, protection and management are higher in small and medium sized companies than in big ones – $3,670 and $3,270 respectively. When this is translated into global data, we get $1.1 trillion and this is how much the whole world spends on data protection and management.
The research further showed that the information is very important for the organization and the respondents believe they represent 49% of its “total value”. They also report that a potential data loss would cause a serious damage to the company resulting in loss of customers, damaged brand, decreased revenues, increased expenses and tumbling stock price.
Challenges of data protection and management
Even though business data is of crucial importance for the organization, IT professionals still find it difficult to manage them. 69% of the respondents admitted that their organizations lost or uncovered some of the confidential information last year, while 31% couldn’t pass certain critical tests related to data safety and privacy regulations. The causes of data loss were human error, software and hardware failures and lost or stolen mobile devices.
Another problem in data management is related to data duplication. It is estimated that 42% of data is duplicated and all the storage costs of such data represent an unnecessary expense. Deduplication strategies (eliminating duplicates) are poorly conducted or are not conducted at all.
Around 75% of business data is stored locally, while the rest is in cloud. Even though only two thirds of local capacities are used, the companies increasingly move to the cloud. It is believed that the staff responsible for data storing doesn’t decide upon using cloud storage.
In the end Symantec suggests that companies should find better ways to ‘integrate data protection solutions across the entire infrastructure’. In the process of adopting the cloud and virtualization solutions ‘managers should first focus on the information instead of data centers or devices’.
