Businesses now have more data than ever - and many can't keep it safe

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Data is piling up faster than firms can handle it, Rubrik finds

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Image Credit: Shutterstock (Image credit: Shutterstock)

The amount of data average businesses generate these days is at an all-time high, and is set to only keep growing. 

That makes safeguarding the data - a staple of every successful business - a Herculean task that’s only going to get more difficult, according to a new report from  Rubrik Zero Labs.

The company found a typical organization’s data has grown by almost half (42%) over the last 18 months. Data from SaaS grew the most overall (145%), followed by cloud (73%), and on-prem endpoints (20%). On average, a typical organization has 240 backend terabytes (BETB) of data volume, with Rubrik expecting this to grow by 100 BETB in the next year, and by 7x in the next five years.

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Outpacing security practices

A hefty portion of this data is sensitive. On average, global organizations have 24.8 million sensitive data records, with 61% storing them across multiple locations (cloud, on-prem, SaaS). Just 4% have dedicated sensitive data storage locations. 

More than half (53%) lost sensitive data in the last year, with 16% reporting multiple data loss incidents just last year. Most of the time, the organizations would lose personally identifiable information (38%), corporate financial data (37%), and authentication credentials (32%). 

Worryingly, two-thirds (66%) of respondents said their firm’s data grows faster than their ability to manage it. Almost all (98%) have visibility issues, while two-thirds (62%) have trouble meeting laws and regulations. More than half (54%) have but a single senior executive responsible for the security of their data.

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Sead Fadilpašić

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.