The majority of data backups fail, leaving businesses in the lurch

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Unexpected outages are becoming a common feature of the digital-first workplace

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Inadequate data protection has emerged as one of the biggest challenges for organizations as they move to a digital-first workplace, according to a new survey.

Conducted by backup specialists Veeam, the survey covers over 3000 IT decision makers of large companies with more than 1000 employees, across 28 countries. One of the startling revelations of the survey is that 58% of backups fail, in turn exposing the organization to debilitating data loss in the event of an outage. 

The survey also revealed that 95% of the firms experienced unexpected outages in the last year, even as 30% admitted that inadequate data protection has slowed or even halted their digital transformation initiatives. 

Unsurprisingly, respondents note that the resulting data loss and the downtime negatively impacts their bottom line, and even leads to a loss of confidence from their customers and stakeholders. 

Inadequately prepared

The survey was conducted to gauge the disaster recovery strategies across organizations as an increasing number go through the process of digital transformation (DX). Allan, however, believes the lack of adequate data management and backup strategies undermines the digitization efforts.

“Simply put, if a backup fails, the data remains unprotected, which is a huge concern for businesses given that the impacts of data loss and unplanned downtime span from customer backlash to reduced corporate share prices. Further compounding this challenge is the fact that the digital threat landscape is evolving at an exponential rate,” shares Veeam’s Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy, Danny Allan.

Allan believes that resilience should be the first step towards digital transformation. “By 2023, 77% of businesses globally will be using cloud-first backup, increasing the reliability of backups, shifting cost management and freeing up IT resources to focus on DX projects that allow the organization to excel in the digital economy,” Allan believes.

Mayank Sharma
Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.