Data Health Check 2018

10 years is a long time.

IT and cyber security have seen a huge amount of change since 2008 – so how do industry practitioners feel now vs 10 years ago?

Much to our surprise, backup has remained remarkably consistent. Internal behaviours and procedures have remained steady. Opinions around the state of backup have shifted positively.

How much data do you protect?

As a company grows, so too does the data it protects. And due to increasing digitalisation, managing the resultant exponential growth is key to any business, particularly a growing one. So it’s unsurprising the number of businesses protecting over 100 TB of data has more than doubled in the last 10 years.

Interestingly, 16% of the 2018 respondents didn’t know how much data they were protecting.**

*These results have been consolidated to include respondents protecting ≥ 100 TB and up to 1 PB of data.

**This is a new response for 2018, hence we could not compare with previous years.

Hover over me!

Use of encryption in backups

As you might expect, there has been a rise in encrypting backups. What is perhaps surprising is a third of respondents still do not encrypt their backups.

Confidence in backup solutions

Confidence in backup solutions has risen significantly since 2008. The 18 percentage point increase in people who are ’very confident’ in their backup capability is particularly encouraging.

Major causes of data loss in the last 12 months

Hardware failure, software failure and human error were the chief culprits for data loss 10 years ago. The same is true today. It would be easy to put a negative slant on this, lamenting a lack of progress in stamping out the same issues.

But given the rate of change the IT industry has experienced and will continue to experience, it’s not surprising errors continue to crop up.